Tanja Fritz, Änne Petersen, Stefan Janke und Martin Daumiller zeigen im Rahmen des Psychologischen Forschungskolloquiums welche Faktoren bei akademischer Unredlichkeit Einfluss haben könnten.

Understanding why some students cheat and others do not, is very important to create fair and successful educational processes and learning experiences for society. To explain reasons for engaging in academic dishonesty, researchers have used an achievement goal approach in past research. In doing so, researchers frequently considered learning goals, characterized by a focus on skill improvement, and performance goals, characterized by a focus on skill demonstration. Such goals can either be pursued by students themselves or be made salient in the classroom through teachers and peers. Theoretically and empirically, learning goals have consistently been associated with less academic dishonesty—opposed to that, it is not clear how performance goals relate to academic dishonesty, as both positive and negative effects, or no associations at all, have been reported in empirical studies on this topic (Daumiller & Janke, 2019, 2020). We seek to better understand this line of research on how goals are associated with academic dishonesty. To this end, we meta-analytically summarize the existing research on this topic and consider moderating factors bound to the operationalization of the constructs (e.g., whether personal or classroom goals are considered), the composition of the sample (e.g., secondary school versus university students) as well as the study designs (e.g., observing actual behaviour versus self-report measures). Taken together, these findings should allow us to better understand how, and under which circumstances, achievement goals are related to academic dishonesty.