Category: Course Design

Johanna Inman, Assistant Director, CAT

Like many instructors, I’ve always included a plagiarism policy on my syllabus. For years, this was my approach to plagiarism prevention. When plagiarism detection software such as SafeAssign came along, I began to incorporate it into my assignments and often shared reports with students as a way to increase their awareness of plagiarism and hopefully further prevent it. However, not long after I began using this tool, an incident occurred that helped me realize this approach was lacking. A student submitted a 15 page final research paper, which SafeAssign identified as over 85% plagiarized. I had never experienced this extreme case of plagiarism. I was livid. After a review of the students’ plagiarism report, it was clear to me that large portions of text were copied from other sources and throughout the paper she had simply gone in and replaced individual words or portions of sentences.

I immediately called the student in for an individual meeting to discuss the paper. Together we looked at the report and I asked, “do you have any explanation for this?” The student did not. I continued to probe her, but it wasn’t until I used the term “plagiarism” that she exclaimed, “I was paraphrasing–that’s okay to do!” After we talked some more, I came to realize that this was her understanding of paraphrasing. She had always been told that paraphrasing was putting someone else’s ideas into her own words and that’s what she thought she had done. At that moment, I realized that I had had been shortsighted. While I had spent almost an entire class session reviewing MLA guidelines for in-text citations, references, and format, I had never explained the differences between paraphrasing, quoting, and plagiarism or provided examples of each. At that point, I helped the student rework a few sentences in her paper. Then, I asked her to rewrite the rest of it on her own and submit it back to me the following week.

Before this incident, I always assumed that plagiarism occurred as a result of laziness or intentional deceit. But as my story illustrates and the research suggests, causes for plagiarism are often more complex. The reasons students plagiarize not only include lack of skill or knowledge–as in my student’s case–but others such as cultural differences around ideas about intellectual property. For other students, plagiarism can be motivated by low self-efficacy or a range of external pressures they face to succeed. More often than not, incidents of plagiarism are ripe for “teachable moments” and can provide a meaningful learning experience.
 

Six Strategies to Help Prevent Plagiarism

1. Educate Students About Intellectual Property

In addition to clearly defining plagiarism and including a plagiarism policy on your syllabus, make sure to discuss intellectual property early on in the semester. Additionally, communicating consequences for plagiarism both in your class, as well as their career can help students develop respect for intellectual property.

Provide students with concrete examples of plagiarism so they better understand the concept. You may also want to give students an opportunity to practice citing, quoting, or paraphrasing (with feedback) before they submit a final paper. Make sure students are aware of important campus resources like reference librarians and the writing center—you might even consider inviting them to your class. There are also many online resources available, including plagiarism quizzes and tutorials.

2. Design More Effective Assignments

Another strategy that prevents plagiarism is intentionally designing assignments that are challenging or nearly impossible to plagiarize. One way to do this is to “scaffold” students’ research and writing process. For example, have students write a proposal in which they articulate a research question, identify some initial sources, and outline a plan for gathering information and writing their paper. Another approach is to have students complete an annotated bibliography, in advance of a rough draft, which eventually leads to the final paper. Scaffolding provides students feedback about their work and empowers them to succeed, while at the same time reduces pressure that could lead to academic dishonesty.

Assignments that are creative and specific to the moment or context are also harder to buy or copy off of the internet. You might ask students to make connections between course material and unique variables such as current events, local phenomena, or personal experience.

3. Empower Students to Succeed

Helping students feel that they can succeed is crucial to plagiarism prevention. Students are much less likely to plagiarize if they feel they have the skills and knowledge to accomplish the task. A few measures like scaffolding assignments, communicating expectations with a rubric, and helping students develop a growth mindset are all best practices that empower students.

4. Create a Positive and Inclusive Classroom Climate
Research shows a significant link between classroom environment and academic dishonesty. Students are less likely to be dishonest in courses where they have a positive rapport with their instructor. For example, courses where they know the teacher and feel the teacher knows them, respects them, and cares about their learning. The less “anonymous” students feel, the less likely they are to intentionally submit someone else’s work as their own.  

5. Use Plagiarism Detection Software
Plagiarism detection software flags most instances of unoriginal text, allowing you to quickly identify missing citations. Although the software helps identify plagiarism, you can also deter plagiarism by making students aware that you use it. Allowing students to see the software’s report can also point out students’ over-reliance on quotes and help them learn how to cite appropriately.

6. Respond Appropriately to Acts of Plagiarism
What should you do if you incorporate all of these strategies, but a student still submits plagiarized work? An appropriate response to plagiarism can also be an effective strategy towards preventing it in the future, while not responding reinforces a lack of academic integrity in students.

If you receive material from a student you suspect is plagiarized, first you should gather evidence and identify the original source. Then, share your evidence with the student to initiate a conversation and try to diagnose the cause. Is this intentional academic dishonesty, or are you dealing with a misunderstanding or lack of research skills? If you believe this is an educational issue you may want to give the student a second chance. Ask yourself if the student would learn by redoing the assignment correctly. Would they learn by analyzing the problem and reflecting on what went wrong? In many cases, this is an opportunity to clarify misconceptions and further educate students. However, in cases that clearly require disciplinary action, you should consult your chair.  Your chair can review the case and advise you on appropriate measures.

Let’s Exchange EDvice!

What strategies do you use in your teaching to help prepare students for scholarly work and prevent plagiarism?

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University

Imagine a jet plane cruising down a road. It’s possible, though a clear case of underutilization of the technology. Now take that imagery and apply it to Open Educational Resources (OER). While they are available for adoption by faculty as learning content, the full potential of OER goes underutilized. How so? At the Open Ed ’16 Conference, held November 2016, I learned how faculty are taking on that challenge and finding new ways to create and use OER.

A keynote and multiple sessions explored open pedagogy as the next frontier in achieving a culture of openness in higher education. While the majority of faculty are just beginning to discover OER, as is often the case with advances in learning and the adoption of educational technologies, we can be inspired by the experiences of early adopters. At Open Ed ’16 those pioneers shared their insights into and experience with the open pedagogy movement.

In his keynote, Gardner Campbell challenged attendees to adopt pedagogical practices that engage students in a “eureka hunt” which means creating assignments that put students in a position to have a unique discovery or an “aha” moment. He referred to this as “insight-oriented education” and educators achieve it when they equip students to take responsibility for their own learning. Our work, said Campbell, is not to graduate more students, but to enable students to graduate themselves. Though Campbell’s talk could be described as more conceptual than practical, he was followed by David Wiley and three faculty who shared how they are using open pedagogy to do exactly what Campbell advocates.

Wiley, organizer of the Open Ed Conference, has, to an extent, told us what he means by open pedagogy in a 2013 blog post (the source of my plane analogy). He encouraged faculty to shift from what he calls “disposable assignments” to “renewable assignments”. Disposable assignments are the ones students hate to do, faculty hate to grade and are quickly forgotten. Think ten-page term papers. Renewable assignments are insight-oriented. They engage students in their own learning. More importantly, they are renewable in the sense that the next class of students will inherit them. Future students will both learn from and build upon them as an act of creating new, open learning content. As an example Wiley described his “Kung-Fu” assignment that requires students to take old video sequences and replace the dialogue with a new soundtrack that describes a contemporary technology challenge. He shared a student’s “Blogs vs. Wikis” video to demonstrate what students can accomplish when challenged.  

This is how students work with faculty to create OER. Robin DeRosa, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University, shared an equally powerful example of open pedagogy.  Working with her students, together they created the open textbook The Open Anthology of Early American Literature. She explained the technology behind the project and how the students were involved to identify and organize the content. Admittedly, DeRosa told the audience, this project required more effort than any of her previous assignments. She felt it was among the most rewarding because the students created the textbook as they learned the subject matter. The open textbook gave the students the satisfaction of sharing their work with future students.

If DeRosa’s textbook project seems like an overwhelming place to begin exploring open pedagogy, consider something on a smaller scale but with similar outcomes. In the talk “Free and Freedom” Rajiv Jhangiani, open learning advocate and psychology professor from Kwantlan Polytechnic Institute, suggested that faculty try a “public scholarship” project where students work collaboratively to create content that is publicly accessible and sustainable. One of Jhangiani’s example was the Wikipedia research project in which students work together to either update or enhance an existing Wikipedia article or write an entirely new one (I write about the virtues of these projects in more detail here). Students typically use the institution’s primary and secondary research resources to gather the information used to update or write the entry, serving the added valuable function of building their research and writing skills.

For faculty not yet ready to take on a textbook project like DeRosa’s, the Wikipedia research project is a good first step to achieving “renewable” assignments. Though a drastic departure from a traditional essay or research paper, Wikipedia offers multiple guides for faculty wanting to experiment with open pedagogy. Students find it more challenging, but express appreciation for the opportunity to create a Wikipedia article that lives beyond the end of the course. It also gives them a far better understanding of how information becomes available for Internet consumption. They learn firsthand that anyone can create Internet content, which offers a valuable lesson in why evaluation is a critical skill.

My big takeaway from Open Ed ’16 is that the OER conversation is evolving beyond the basics of what are open educational resources, where they are found, how they are incorporated into courses and how to advocate for their use. While all of those issues are still important to discuss, there is new thinking about the benefits of OER for students when we involve them in their own learning through the practice of open pedagogy.

Pete Watkins, Associate Director, TLC

As I listened to Dr. Saundra McGuire’s keynote presentation on metacognition at Temple’s 15th Annual Faculty Conference on Teaching Excellence, a troubling thought occurred to me.  I made it through two decades of schooling as well as nearly a decade of teaching at the college level without ever hearing the word metacognition.  No one ever taught me to read actively or to monitor my own thinking.  Why do we keep this stuff a secret?  Teachers and students need to know “how to learn”.  Fortunately, McGuire has made it her “revolutionary mission to make all students expert learners.”
 

What is metacognition and why should I care about it?

In McGuire’s keynote address she explained, metacognition is the ability to:

• think about your own thinking
• be consciously aware of yourself as a problem solver
• monitor, plan, and control your mental processing (e.g. “Am I understanding this material, or just memorizing it?”)
• accurately judge your level of learning
• know what you know and what you don’t know

McGuire points out that many of us who are college professors probably learned good metacognitive skills on our own.  But we should not assume that our students know how to learn.  

Active reading is a good example of a metacognitive strategy that we can teach our students.  We presume that college students can read. However, McGuire points out that active reading using strategies such as SQ5R is different from the way that most college students read and we should invest the time to teach students to read actively.   

McGuire also believes in teaching students about Bloom’s Taxonomy.  As a faculty developer, I have introduced Bloom’s Taxonomy to many teachers, but it never occurred to me to introduce it to students.  McGuire asserts that when students learn about Bloom’s Taxonomy “they begin to have learning goals instead of GPA goals.”
 

McGuire is the former director of the Center for Academic Success at Louisiana State University.  Her Center taught students a five-step Study Cycle that empowers them to be good learners.  The five steps are:

1. Preview-before class skim new materials and note the big ideas
2. Attend class-take notes and ask questions
3. Review-after class, review notes and write down questions or gaps
4. Study-schedule study sessions several times per week and use active strategies
5. Assess/Check-Is my strategy working?  Do I understand the material? 

McGuire challenged us all as teachers to better serve our students while also acknowledging that students share responsibility for their learning.  And she delivered her message with her characteristic wit and warmth, which was greatly appreciated on a day when the temperature outside was in the teens.  Her book Teach Students How to Learn is a must read for people who teach college and want to empower their students to be good learners.  

 

Let’s Exchange EDvice!

What strategies have you found effective in teaching students how to learn?

Cliff Rouder, Assistant Director, CAT

Nota Bene: This is a true classroom experience I had during my undergraduate student days.  Please fasten your seatbelts as we prepare for take-off.  

Picture it: a 900-seat auditorium at a major research university. My first day of introductory physics. My friends and I entered the massive lecture hall and settled in. Suddenly, we heard (and felt) a very loud rumbling noise coming from stage left. In a flash, we caught a glimpse of a man seated on what looked like a rocket-shaped go-cart racing across the stage. Applause, and then a collective sigh of relief. Surely this was not the “weed out” course we were warned about. Surely this was a professor who had thought about how to make this course meaningful and motivating. Surely we were going to get lots of practice and support. Well, turns out we were surely wrong.  

Things went from awesome to “uh oh” faster than that rocket. After our instructor disembarked, he put 900 copies of a one-page syllabus on a table and told us we could pick it up at the end of the class if we thought we could pass the course after that first lecture. He then walked over to three massive blackboards and furiously wrote equations nonstop for the next 50 minutes. We, too, were furiously copying (and mis-copying) what he was writing, while not understanding a thing. We had no clue how the homework problems related to what he wrote on those blackboards, and he never helped us connect them. If you’re still wondering what the rocket entrance had to do with the course, he never told us, at least not before my friends and I got our first exams back and made the unilateral decision to drop the course. The experience was enough to cause some of my friends to switch majors. “Houston, we have a problem.”

Although there are multiple factors involved in a student’s decision to drop a STEM major, the good news is that what we do in our classrooms has the potential to positively impact retention directly, or on potential mediators of retention like reduced failure rate, improved exam scores, and self-efficacy. We now know a lot more about how learning works in the brain and the teaching strategies that can promote deep and lasting learning (you know, the kind that’s more than just memorizing information the night before an exam and forgetting it the day after). And the best news of all is that incorporating some of these strategies into your courses is pretty doable.

Let’s Exchange EDvice!

How could “Professor Rocket” have…

• used his rocket entrance as a “hook” to find out, relative to his course content, what students already knew; what misconceptions they had brought with them; and what interests and prior experiences they had?  Why would doing this be valuable?  What are some less grandiose “hooks” you might use in your courses?
   

• challenged his students in a more supportive way?  What might he have said, or what might he have written in his syllabus to create an environment where students felt included and supported while being challenged?  What might you do in your courses to create this environment?
   
• engaged us in the learning process even though we were in an auditorium?  Why is this important to do?  What in-class opportunities do you give your students to work with course concepts and content?

Operators are standing by, so let’s hear from you! After all, who wouldn’t want to “rocket” a course to greatness?!