Honoring the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars Participants

Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars (WTFS) is a signature program of the Universities of Wisconsin. Each year two instructors from each UW campus are selected to represent their institution. Participants spend one year in professional community, and they design and carry out individual scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects that are presented at the OPID Spring Conference. This year UWGB had two stellar representatives: Heather Kaminski and Taskia A. Khan. Professor Khan compared two traditional assignments with one that followed Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) principles by evaluating students’ perceptions of clarity, relevance, engagement, confidence, and learning. Professor Kaminski examined the impact on governmental accounting students of engaging in the scaffolded, high-impact practice of creating an Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for local government agencies.

Headshot of Heather Kaminski
Heather Kaminsk
Assistant Professor
Cofrin E. School of Business 
Headshot of Taskia
Taskia A. Khan
Assistant Teaching Professor
Resch School of Engineering

The 2025-2026 WTFS representatives from UWGB will be Professors Alison Jane Martingano and Golam Mushih Tanimul Ahsan. They will join the program next year with new co-facilitator Georjeanna Wilson-Doenges. If this all sounds like a great opportunity to you, watch for the Call for Applications in Fall 2025.

Evidence-Based Approaches to Promoting Academic Honesty

Academic honesty has always been a concern in higher education, but the proliferation of technology has changed the scope and nature of the problem. Students have access to more electronic means to cheat, including AI-generated papers and websites that provide access to test bank questions and answers. Meanwhile, professors can deploy competing technologies designed to search automatically for plagiarized content, lock down browsers during exams, or remotely proctor test-taking.

It should come as no surprise that there are ethical concerns about both academic dishonesty itself and the privacy and intellectual property issues raised by technologies intended to detect or prevent it. In fact, one Canadian professor recently taught an academic course on cheating, and he is a co-investigator on a large-scale study of college student motivations to pay others to do their work.

The SoTL literature on this topic often lags behind the technological advances, but there are some recent studies instructors may find helpful. Duncan and Joyner (2022) surveyed students and TAs about digital proctoring, and although their sample was not representative, their resulting article is definitely worth a read. They provide a nice overview of costs of benefits of the practice, and they also effectively summarize the literature on alternative assessment strategies faculty can employ. Another recent addition to the body of knowledge on academic honesty is a study of six relatively low-tech and brief methods to reduce cheating, such as allowing students to withdraw assignments. Again, there are some methodological issues with the research, but instructors may find the techniques and review of past research on them illuminating.

The issue of academic integrity is complex, multi-faceted, and rapidly evolving given its intersection with emerging technology. Additional examples of relevant SoTL research on the topic are included below. CATL will update this list as we are able. Feel free to contact us with suggested resources as well.

Additional Resources