Innovative teaching strategy for promoting academic integrity in simulation

Maintaining academic integrity is a universal problem and can be especially difficult when implementing a simulation scenario that must take place over several days. It became obvious to faculty that students scheduled in later sessions exceeded realistic expectations in their performances. In response to this, faculty created two scenarios (one psychiatric and one medical-surgical)with flexibility that provided each student a unique and challenging learning experience while guiding the facilitator along various pathways based on the student’s actions in the scenario. This allowed the overall learning objectives to be maintained regardless of students sharing information from simulations scheduled on earlier dates. Adapting the scenario based on individual student’s responses allowed each student to have a unique learning opportunity in spite of the students being “prepped” by students that had already participated in the simulation. Faculty and student feedback revealed the flexibility of the scenarios was a valuable and meaningful learning experience. This paper discusses how to plan and implement this innovative approach to simulation, which will help to counter the effects of information sharing among students.