TOOLS FOR THE TEKS: INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM

Strategies to Address Digital Plagiarism

by Wesley A. Fryer
www.wesfryer.com

We live in a digital age where ever increasing numbers of students enjoy Internet access at home, a relative’s house, or a friend’s house. While Internet access is almost ubiquitous in US classrooms (for at least one computer in the classroom), the digital divide remains a domestic as well as international concern. According to mid-2004 surveys, 44 percent of all US households with income less than $30,000 per year have a home computer connected to the Internet. Percentages for Internet use statistically increase with household income levels.[1] As these usage numbers continue to rise, access to the Internet becomes more routine for a greater percentage of our students.

These trends have important implications for student homework and should signal a need for basic changes in the way teachers formulate and assign student work. Any student who can get online, instant message and use email is likely adept at copying and pasting. While digital immigrants (a category that includes many teachers) may still marvel at PowerPoint presentations students can readily create full of text and copied graphics, these creations may or may not represent an in-depth understanding of content.

Dictionary.com defines plagiarism this way:

To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one's own.
To appropriate for use as one's own passages or ideas from (another).

Plagiarism has always been an educational reality, but its prolific nature in the 21^st century classroom may be underestimated and poorly understood by many teachers. A 2003 study of students at Rudger’s University revealed that almost forty percent of students plagiarized content from the Internet.[2] Unfortunately, digital plagiarism is not limited to college students. This article presents a variety of strategies that can be used by K-16 educators to address the age-old problem of plagiarism, which is more prolific than ever before thanks to its digital face.

Strategy #1: Convey Expectations Regularly to Students

What do your students perceive plagiarism or cheating to be? Education about plagiarism needs to begin at a young age. Interestingly, literacy activities in primary grades often begin with copying words and sentences, but original work is also required even of first graders. Ask students to tell you about their perceptions, and then analyze some examples of student work that include plagiarism.

Discuss with students the difference between “paraphrasing” and “plagiarizing.” If you have an original or effective way of explaining this, please email it to me and I will share it with others! Most teachers can remember using an encyclopedia when they were in school themselves, changing some of the text to “put it in their own words.” Talk to students about what it means to do this and show them what it looks like. Show good examples as well as bad ones, with names removed from the writing samples, of course.

Every teacher at every grade level should convey expectations regarding plagiarism to students. Tell students what you value most are their ideas, perceptions, and understandings, and then demonstrate this belief in the way you make assignments and assess them.

Strategy #2: Require Works Cited / Bibliography / References

If students obtain information from other sources when they write, they should attribute their sources at the end of their essay. These must include Internet websites when they are utilized. As a minimum, consider asking students to document the webpage title, URL, and the date they accessed a site on their references page. Have students document their sources as they find them, since it is often difficult to find webpages visited but not printed or bookmarked. If a webpage is no longer available because it has been removed or moved, use a tool like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Engine to view a cached (saved) version: www.archive.org.

Teach students how to insert direct quotations in their writing and properly cite them. Students need to understand that the use of direct quotations is not plagiarism when the quotation is properly documented. In fact, quotations are an essential part of both academic and journalistic writing. If someone has said or written something succinctly, students should know how to properly quote and cite them.

Grade level teachers may want to meet and agree upon common standards for source citations. I have provided a variety of online citation source guides and tools that can be used to format and even dynamically create references, on the Intellectual Property page of my Tools and Techniques website: www.wtvi.com/teks/tools/intellectual_property.html.

Strategy #3: Assess the Writing Process

If you are assigning students to write and are only grading their final copy, you are doing students a great disservice. Although writing teachers may seem to believe as a group that the writing process should be uniform for everyone, the fact is that different people write in different ways. Still, it is important for students to learn about the different elements of the “formal” writing process, and to assess different steps in that process.

Unfortunately, the primary way many teachers communicate what is important to students is by the things they choose to grade. For writing assignments, require students to turn in prewriting materials, rough outlines, notes, and their rough draft. Require that students peer edit the work of other students, and have their work edited by other peers. Assign grades to these different elements of their writing project, to tangibly communicate the value you ascribe to these writing steps which should precede the final draft.

Strategy #4: Require Oral Student Presentations

The ease of copying and pasting text from an Internet webpage into a word processor has made the need for oral student presentations more vital than ever. If you are not asking your students to verbally explain to you and their classmates what they understand and know about a topic they have researched, you may not have a very accurate perception of the authentic learning that has taken place as a result of the assignment.

Student presentations should NOT be defined by students reading word-for-word from a prepared PowerPoint presentation. Students need to learn how to use a multimedia presentation as a visual aid, not a teleprompter. The development of oral language is a key literacy skill (found throughout the TEKS incidentally) and should not be relegated only to language arts teachers. Regardless of the content area you teach, ask students to explain what they know. We know as educators that greater mastery is required for those who teach, relative to those who merely “learn” in a traditional student sense. When you ask students to teach what they have learned to their peers, that active process is likely to promote long term retention and result in authentic learning.

Strategy #5 Require Students to Compare and Synthesize

Technology integration for a large number of students and teachers is equated with access to information via the World-Wide Web, yet many teachers who encourage or at least acknowledge the reality of student Internet access have not changed the way they formulate student assignments. If you give students an assignment similar to this one: “Write a paper about an African country of your choice, including information about the geography, economy, history, and culture of the nation”—you need to change your ways.

Instead of simply asking students for a report on Egypt, ask them to write about some specific comparisons between the cultural activities of Muslims in Egypt and people living in your region. Structure the questions you ask students to answer in their assignments so higher order thinking skills are required, including comparing and synthesizing information from multiple sources.

Strategy #6 Teach Students to Critically Question Source Validity

Anyone who has Internet access can publish on the World-Wide Web. Today with the prevalence of free online tools like weblogs, web publishing does not even require technical expertise: just the ability to visit a website, remember your username and password, and click several buttons.

Some people may yearn for the days of textbook and encyclopedia dominated student research to return, but the fact is: the Internet is here and it does not appear to be going away. Students searching Google for information about Martin Luther King Jr. are likely to encounter revisionist history websites sponsored by hate groups as well as sites with historically accurate biographies and personal information. For more on this topic including strategies for validating Internet information, please refer to my Fall 2003 article, “Digital Literacy Now!” (www.wtvi.com/teks/03_04_articles/digital_literacy_now.html)

Strategy #7: Require Students to Blog

How many teachers in your school building know what a weblog is? Teachers have asked students to journal about different things for many years, but only recently has it become practical for student journals to be available online for an authentic audience extending well beyond the traditional walls of the classroom.

Students can not only use a weblog as an online journal, but also as a place to publish their work and share it with classmates. Weblog accounts can be configured with password protection so only classmates or family members can have access to view student writing, if desired. Before publishing information online, students must be counseled about online safety and the need to keep personal information private. For more information about using weblogs in instruction, refer to my “Writing Across the Curriculum” workshop on www.wtvi.com/teks/integrate/writing/. For more about student safety online, refer to http://kids.getnetwise.org/safetyguide/privacy/.

Strategy #8: Use Assessment Rubrics Including Peer Reviews

Some students are highly motivated at the prospect of writing to please their teacher, but many are not. Publishing work on a weblog can change the writing process for students in fundamental ways, because of the presence of an authentic audience in addition to their classroom teacher. Students should get into the habit of having other people review and help edit their writing. Blogs which allow for visitor comments are an excellent forum for feedback, but can also invite harsh criticism if comments can be made anonymously. When selecting a free blogging service, look for the option of blocking anonymous comments, as well as the option for users to delete comments made to their blog.

Utilize a rubric to assess student work, and invite them to help you construct it. This helps convey your expectations for a given assignment, and also empowers students to recognize their valid abilities as evaluators as well as producers of literary products. Kathy Schrock has an excellent collection of websites relating to assessment rubrics on http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/assess.html.

Strategy #9: Use Google Advanced Search

Teachers who know their students (and even sometimes when they don’t) can often pick out a word-for-word plagiarized sentence from a student essay. Just as the Internet has made it easy for students to copy and paste a writing assignment and create a masterpiece of plagiarism, the creators of Google have made it amazingly easy for teachers to identify and catch these digital plagiarizers.

Go to Google’s homepage (www.google.com) and click the “Advanced Search” option (it is in small letters on the right side of the search box.) Either copy and paste or type in the sentence or phrase you suspect is plagiarized from the web into the search box beside “Find results with the exact phrase.” More than likely, the webpage source will turn up right away. When looking for source text on a webpage, search on the webpage itself by pressing control (command/apple on a Mac) and the F key. If you did an “exact phrase” Google search, a page search should yield that precise sentence or phrase.

Strategy #10 Try Commercial Websites and Software to Identify Plagiarism

Google is a powerful, free tool that can help teachers identify and “prove” plagiarism has taken place, but other commercial tools can make the process even easier and more efficient. This functionality comes at a price, but it may be worth it depending on how many student projects you must assess. If you have students turn in work electronically, some of these software and website solutions can scan through their work very quickly. Some of the current options with promise include:

TurnItIn.com: www.turnitin.com
Ithenticate: www.ithenticate.com
Essay Verification Engine (Windows operating systems only): www.canexus.com/eve/
Glatt Plagiarism Tools (3 available): www.plagiarism.com

Copyscape is similar to Turnitin.com and perhaps not as comprehensive, but free (www.copyscape.com). Additional resources and articles are available on “Educational Cyberplayground-- Catching Digital Cheaters” (www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/plagiarism.html.)[3]

Strategy #11 Amaze and Scare Your Students

Teachers are often uncomfortable in their perception that students know more than they do when it comes to computer technology. Students do not have to know this, however! During whole-class instruction, show a writing sample that includes plagiarized content, and then bring up the webpage (which you have previously bookmarked/saved as a favorite) containing the text the student copied.

Explain to students that just as it is easy for them to copy and paste, it is extremely easy for you to use the Internet and locate webpages they have used when they have plagiarized. You do not need to show them how you used an advanced Google search to accomplish this feat: let them wonder and hypothesize about your clairvoyant and amazingly powerful computer abilities. The key is to help students not only understand what plagiarism is, but how they can write authentically without copying. (Why they should do this from an ethical perspective is also vital!) Do not hesitate to give a student a zero on an assignment that has been plagiarized. At many universities, plagiarism can ultimately result in expulsion from the institution, although it often carries a less severe penalty (like an F for an entire course.) Don’t put off these important lessons for another teacher in a later grade to address: plagiarism and honest writing is a teaching responsibility we all share.

Concluding Thoughts

Allegations that an “heiress” to the WalMart fortune and relative of the deceased Sam Walton, Elizabeth Paige Laurie, paid her roommate over $20,000 while a student at the University of Southern California, are a telling sign of the times.[4] While not many students have thousands of dollars to pay a roommate to do their homework, many students are paying others to write their papers. The list of commercial websites offering generic as well as customized to order term papers is eye-opening and saddening. A partial list includes:

The motto of www.schoolsucks.com is “download your workload.” If the workload of your students is “downloadable,” it is time for you to change your ways. Hopefully the suggestions in this article will be helpful in this endeavor. If you have other suggestions I have not included, please send them to me. In K-16 education, we are teaching students in the millennial generation who take for granted things like Internet access that was barely imagined a few decades ago. Just as “testing is not teaching,” neither should plagiarizing be equated with learning. It is a lesson we all need to model and teach.

Wesley Fryer was a fourth grade writing teacher and still considers the reading/writing workshop his favorite instructional activity. Catch up on his latest musings about education and life in general on his weblog at www.wesfryer.com/blog.