Addressing academic integrity with target behaviour-led strategic framework

University in Australia

Strategic insight and foresight, Innovating for thriving futures

With the rise of technology and AI tools, the line between academic misconduct and support is increasingly blurred. Tobias was tasked with identifying core issues in student and staff behaviours, co-designing interventions to change these behaviours, and developing a strategic framework for long-term impact. This resulted in a university-wide response plan and tested communication concepts to support academic integrity.

With the rise of technology- and AI-enabled academic tools, the line between academic misconduct and support is blurring. Traditional detection methods and tools are often ineffective, generating a large number of false positives, new detection methods are continuously outrun by new tools and the exact scale of academic misconduct remains unclear.

Tobias was commissioned to deliver an end-to-end project from discovery to concept testing to respond to the problem, which poses reputational, financial, institutional and ethical risks among others.

To unpack the complexity of academic integrity and create a pathway for misconduct prevention and responses, we designed an innovative method that integrates a behaviour design framework with a human-centred design approach for the University. We identified the problems at core, specifically focusing on the student and staff behaviours associated with academic misconduct, co-designed intervention ideas to change their behaviours, built the findings into a framework setting out the strategic levers of change, created a roadmap for the implementation of change and tested communication concepts and methods.

• Qualitative research to understand behaviours and mindsets
  Our process included rigorous qualitative research that provided a deep, contextual, nuanced understanding of the current state, which led to a development of a set of student and staff archetypes and a systemic perspective. The key in the behavioural archetype development was to identify the drivers, motivations, attitudes, needs and behaviours associated with academic integrity, highlighting that archetypes aren’t static. An individual student may reflect different archetypes at different stages of their academic journey. Students may change archetypes as they face particular circumstances (e.g. high stress situations) or fall into multiple archetypes at once. This approach to archetype development allowed intervention ideas to emerge and be developed with empathy rather than vilifying a group as “cheaters”.

• Co-designed Academic Integrity Strategic Framework and prioritisation
  We adopted a behaviour change framework called the Behaviour Change Wheel and embedded it throughout our research and strategy development processes. The stakeholders used the archetypes to generate a set of target behaviours; used intervention types as prompts to generate intervention ideas that could help achieve those target behaviours by changing influences associated with capability, opportunity and motivation; and evaluated the ideas. The result is a strategic framework with stakeholder- and evidence-led intervention ideas and outcomes – a blueprint to help the university to prioritise, develop, test and implement interventions and drive behaviour change. The intervention ideas were prioritised by the stakeholders and organised into horizons, creating a robust implementation roadmap.

• Concept testing
  The intervention ideas covered a wide range of areas and of them, communication of academic integrity with students was selected for further development and initial concept testing as part of the project. The aim was to understand why certain student cohorts prefer certain concepts, therefore the testing sessions focussed on understanding their experiences, knowledge and behaviours related to communication of academic integrity.

A large number of influences have an impact on behaviour. By deeply understanding what is driving the behaviours and how technology and AI will impact academic integrity into the future, we facilitated multi-faculty and cross-functional discussions on how schools and universities should respond. As a result, we delivered:

• Insights on the current state of academic integrity at the university and how technology and AI is contributing to the student and staff behaviours
• A set of student and staff behavioral archetypes that can be used to design interventions
• Academic Integrity Strategic Framework to help implement intervention ideas
• Tested communication concepts that were used for student orientation day messaging and merchandise implementation
• Staff and student engagement that can be sustained and built on into the future