Children’s Moral Judgment of Academic Cheating and its Relation to Their Actual Behavior

• In Event: When is it Alright to Lie and Cheat? Developmental Perspectives on the Morality of Dishonesty

Abstract

Academic cheating is a serious issue at all levels of education. Despite extensive research with older children and adults beginning in the early 20th century (Hartshorne & May 1928), little is known about younger children’s moral judgment of cheating and whether these judgments relate to actual cheating behaviors. The present study addresses these gaps by eliciting children’s attitudes about academic cheating and observing their behaviors during unmonitored challenging academic tasks.

A sample of 526 children between 4 to 12 years (M = 7.19, SD = 1.80, 51% girls) participated in this study, online via Zoom. Challenging academic tests on various subjects (e.g., math, general knowledge) were administered to observe children’s cheating behaviors. The experimenter instructed children to not peek at the answers at the bottom of their screen (covered by a household item) and left them alone to complete the test questions while being video recorded, without their knowledge. Academic cheating was coded as the number of instances that participants broke the rules set by the experimenter across six rounds, with total scores ranging from zero to six. To assess children’s moral understanding of cheating, participants were presented with vignettes of characters who either did or did not cheat in challenging academic situations. Children categorized the story characters’ behaviors as “good”, “bad” or “not good/not bad”. Each accurate assessment of the story character’s behavior was given a score of one, with total scores ranging from zero to four.

First, most children judged academic cheating negatively (M = 3.14). As age increased, children made even more negative judgments of cheating behaviors (r = .237, p < .001, Figure 1). Second, when conducting a hierarchical regression with age and moral judgment scores entered sequentially as predictors and cheating behaviors as the dependent variable, we found the overall model to be significant with a large effect size, R = .424, F(2, 510) = 55.77, p < .001. Age and moral judgment accounted for 17.6% of the variance in cheating behaviors. The final model revealed age to be significant: as children grew older, they were less likely to cheat, b = -.074, t(1) = -9.397, p < .001, CI = -.089, -.058. Moral judgment scores were also a unique and significant predictor of children’s cheating behavior, albeit with a small effect size, b = -.101, t(1) = -2.453, p = .015, CI = -.236, -.026 (Figure 2); suggesting that children with better moral understanding had lower rates of cheating.

The present study provided new evidence regarding young children’s moral judgment of academic cheating and its association with their actual behaviors. Findings suggest that age plays a significant role in children’s moral judgment of academic dishonesty, which in turn plays a significant role in children’s tendency to cheat on academic tests. However, the small effect size of the relation between children’s moral judgment and their actual cheating behavior suggests that we must examine other social and cognitive factors to gain insights about what else contributes to children’s academic dishonesty in the early years.

Authors

• Kanza Batool, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Kaitlyn Monica Wilson, University of New Brunswick

• Elizabeth Lynn Gerhardt, Saint Mary’s University

• Tz-yu Duan, University of British Columbia (UBC)

• Catherine Ann Cameron, University of British Columbia (UBC)

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto