The very first detention that I gave in my teaching career dealt with academic integrity. A fourth grade student of mine was changing answers on her reading test as we were checking it. The following year I issued a detention for the same type of cheating, however, it was on a spelling test. Why would 9-year old children take such a risk to get a good grade? I can only guess that these students are receiving pressure by peers and/or parents to get all A’s. Academic integrity is something that should be addressed with students beginning in early elementary school. Of course we would not use the words “academic integrity” with a first grade student, however, we can certainly use words such as “cheating” and “copying” and model these behaviors so that a 6 year old can understand that these behaviors are not acceptable. As children progress the examples and methods used by students to copy others work get more complex and should be addressed at every grade level.
Every student has access to the internet and has a limitless number of sources to choose from when working on an assignment. From copying text from a website to actually employing someone to do the work for him/her, the temptation is there. It is virtually impossible for schools to have software to detect all plagiarized work because of the thousands of sources that the work could have been copied from. An example of this is the results of submitting my plagiarism essay to Safe Assign. I plagiarized 90% of the text in my essay entitled “Plagiarism”, the Safe Assign program only found 63% of the plagiarized passages. It is equally impossible for schools to know when a student has had an outside source do the work for him/her. What must happen is that schools must drill the concept of academic integrity into students from the get go and teach students how to cite work that has been taken directly from a source. Schools should also make their academic integrity policy known to students, as well as, parents.
There are many ways that teachers can help students be successful when doing research so that they are not tempted to plagiarize. For example, when my fourth grade students are given a research assignment I stress that work must not be copied from sources without giving the source credit; a discussion on what plagiarism is follows. Then I break the assignment up into several steps. Students must get approval on one step before they can move on to the next step. After brainstorming and selecting a topic, students must create an outline and record information that they find on the outline, being sure not to write sentences but concepts. I model this very important step for the students prior to beginning the research. I have found that this cuts down on them copying sentences from resource materials.
Plagiarism and other forms of cheating cannot be eliminated; however, the number of students that have academic integrity can certainly be increased. By discussing the importance of academic integrity early, giving students the tools to be successful in their research and stressing the importance of giving others credit through proper citations, academic integrity will be on the rise.
Jennifer,
ReplyDeleteI was impressed with the depth of your understanding and experience with the topic of plagiarism. You have truly "simplified" the main components to help prevent it, and effectively incorporated them into your class. I especially appreciated the fact that you address the potential of students getting someone else to do their work for them, as a potential source of plagiarism. I too, have recognized this as a potential concern. (I currently teach at the community college level and have recently developed my first hybrid on-line course that will begin this fall.) This is a topic that I am hoping to gain further insight into discouraging and detecting. Although, my hesitation in opening the discussion to discourage it, is that it may increase it's prevalence (since my environment is not as controlled as yours is).
Your post showed me your understanding as an educator on the topic of academic integrity. By taking your students through each step of a research paper and modeling to show that it is acceptable to use another person’s words and ideas as long as ownership is properly given, shows that you want your students to understand the material and truly succeed.
ReplyDeleteBy no means can a program like Safe Assign be 100% accurate. How would a program be able to detect if another individual was doing the work for someone else?
Like you had mentioned, the academic integrity policy of the school should be something that is drilled not only to students, but to parents as well. It is not something that should just be mentioned on the first day of class, but discussed throughout the entire year. If the importance of academic integrity is stressed at an early age, hopefully it would help to reduce plagiarism and cheating in the future.
I couldn't agree with you more in the fact that academic integrity is a learned behavior! The sooner they understand that it is wrong and they will be punished, the sooner they will remove it from their academic practice. I have caught a couple of students in the high school "cutting and pasting" information on reports and many of their responses were along the lines of "I do this in a lot of my classes and those teachers never say anything". How accurate those statements are that they "always" do it I don't know, but I do feel they try to get away with what they can! If we all had a consistent approach as educators that "plagiarism is cheating!", the less students would even try to get away with it. Also, I really like how you SHOW them how to use found information in research papers. I believe that many students don't know you can use other information as long as you site it correctly. That may be why they "cheat or plagiarize" when really they just need to give credit to their sources.
ReplyDeleteMrs. Piechocki, I agree with your posting. As I mentioned in my blog, as soon as students receive requirements to write papers, they should begin learning how to cite their work. I recall being in grade school and having to look up answers in the text books (history, English, etc); some teachers required that you place the answers exactly as they were in the book, which is actually copying another individual’s work. Some educators at lower levels still practice this today. There were other educators who required that we, the students, include the page number that the answer came from which is a simpler form of citation. The earlier children become aware of citing work, no matter how simplistic (annotating page numbers), the better for them as the requirements increase throughout the years. More educators should implement the research process at a lower educational level.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the effort and the personalization of the topic. I appreciate how you teach academic integrity at such an early age. Don't be surprised about cheating at that age. In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell shares the results of a research study on cheating from the 1950s. It turns out that cheating is very much contextualized. By increasing expectations for academic integrity and moving to demonstrated proficiency, we are doing our best to eliminate cheating and integrity lapses.
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