Reflection:
According to the Center for Academic Integrity,
"Internet plagiarism is a growing concern on all campuses as students
struggle to understand what constitutes acceptable use of the Internet
[…] A majority of students (77%) believe ['cut and paste' plagiarism]
is not a very serious issue" (McCabe). Cut and paste plagiarism, one
among dozens of concerns regarding academic integrity in American Colleges,
results from years of students' conducting research without accountability.
From my educational beginnings as a student teacher, and even from certain
occasions when I was a high school student, I remember observing teachers
who assigned projects that required Internet research but which included
no bibliographic components. In my memory of the most egregious Web-based
plagiarism, the teacher had copied, pasted, and printed dozens of pictures
from portfolios, bringing them to his students without sources for use
in mock newspapers they were to create. While ethical use of information
is a complex and time-consuming issue, neglecting to model and teach
legal practices regarding intellectual property leads to a culture in
which most of a generation believes the use of stolen property to be
a trivial transgression. Teaching and modeling of ethical practices
must start with the youngest students, be reinforced and refined for
older students, and remain important and practical among faculty and
staff. Although I find it impracticable to require elementary students
to use a comprehensive citation system, I believe it is essential to
guide them in citing sources in some-even the simplest-fashion. I created
a lesson about echo-location
aimed toward an audience of fourth graders. The product of the lesson
is a multimedia presentation created by the students, who make use of
pictures and sounds gathered through a guided Web activity. Twenty percent
of the rubric for the project is based on accurate reporting of the
Web addresses where the sounds and pictures were gathered. Teaching
such practices early establishes the theoretical basis for the more
complicated works cited pages students will complete for research projects
in the upper grades. When students begin research in a media center,
they frequently spend time frustrated about where to start. As such,
I created an html research handbook
for my mentoring Media Specialist's library. While much of it is dedicated
to locating resources, a large section of the handbook contains resources
on how to cite sources, format citations, and create bibliographic lists.
I included a works cited list at the bottom of the handbook in order
to model the sort of ethical behavior prescribed in the Academic Honor
Code of the school. Simply having an Academic Honor Code in place in
schools has proven useful in reducing unethical use of information by
students (McCabe), but statistics on plagiarism are based on what we
know about-on those who got caught. Due to the abundance of electronic
resources available to students, teachers are in need of better ways
to teach students how to avoid plagiarism and of tools to hold them
accountable. One such tool is Turnitin.com, a web-based Internet Plagiarism
Prevention Program. As the first to implement its use at my school,
I gave an in-service presentation
on the software last year. The program, which checks text in submitted
papers against all public portfolios, highlights and color codes information
sources, creating reports which are not only clear documentation needed
to pursue disciplinary action but also excellent teaching tools; students
can see the difference between matching text that has been quoted and
cited and that which has been claimed as original work. Hopefully, if
ethical and legal practices are modeled and taught by Media Specialists
and Classroom Teachers through all levels of education, there will come
a time when The Center for Academic Integrity no longer has such disheartening
statistics to share.
Work Cited
McCabe, Don. "CAI Research." The Center
for Academic Integrity. Keenan Institute for Ethics. 2005. Duke University.
16 February 2006.
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Objective: Candidates demonstrate efficient and ethical information-seeking behavior.
