Effects of test difficulty messaging on academic cheating among middle school children.
J Exp Child Psychol
; 220: 105417, 2022 08.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35364442
Academic cheating is a serious worldwide problem that begins during childhood. However, to date there has been little research on academic cheating with children before high school age. The current study used a naturalistic experimental paradigm to evaluate the possibility that systematically manipulating messages about the difficulty of a test can affect whether middle school children (N = 201) would cheat by reporting a falsely inflated test score. We found that test difficulty messaging significantly affected children's cheating behavior. Specifically, telling children that a test was either easy or hard produced higher rates of cheating than telling them that the difficulty level was on par with their current skills. In addition, among the children who chose to cheat, telling them that the test was easy led to a greater degree of cheating. These findings are consistent with theories of academic cheating that point to the importance of approach and avoidance motives in achievement motivation. The findings also suggest that simple messaging can have a significant impact on children's moral behavior and that seemingly innocuous messages such as describing the difficulty of a test can influence children's decisions about whether and how much to cheat.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Deception
/
Motivation
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
Limits:
Child
/
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
J Exp Child Psychol
Year:
2022
Document type:
Article
Country of publication:
United States