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Abstract
Higher education institutions are responsible for ensuring the integrity of the degrees they award, which includes addressing academic misconduct. Students engage in academic misconduct for a plethora of reasons, including individual and contextual factors. Factors such as moral disengagement and failure to judge academic work as a moral issue relate to student moral decision-making. Students have the capacity to grow in their moral decision-making during college; institutions leverage this potential by creating policies and procedures that utilize restorative justice practices to adjudicate cases of alleged academic misconduct and remediate students who acknowledge cheating. This may help students develop their moral decision-making skills by causing prolonged moral dissonance. This dissertation provides a case study of one such institution using restorative justice-based practices. Findings suggest that restorative justice practices functioned as moral disruptors that develop moral decision-making. Despite exposure to these disruptors, students did not necessarily reach the highest levels of moral decision-making to choose academic integrity after committing academic misconduct.