Plagiarism awareness amongst pre-university students: A pilot study in secondary schools

1. Plagiarism awareness amongst pre-university students: A pilot study in secondary schools Dr S D Sivasubramaniam [SHIVA]

2. Rationale: • “More than half of teachers believe internet plagiarism is a serious problem among sixth-form students” - BBC News (Friday, 18 January 2008) • “Sixth-form heads believe young people needed to be tutored as early as year 7 in how to formally credit and reference sources” - Barry Calvert (2010) Plagiarism Conference • Plagiarism, academic dishonesty on the rise among college students – The Daily Northwestern (Monday, October 31, 2011).

3. Aims: • To investigate the basic knowledge on plagiarism amongst university entry-level students. • To study whether anti-plagiarism activities at schools would enhance this knowledge.

4. The Devil’s Advocate I expect you all to be innovative and independent writers who will do exactly what I say”

5. Demographic Details • Secondary schools and sixth form colleges in the East Midlands - Derbyshire Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire =361 (47.2%) 762 Students =401 (52.8%) 701 Students

6. Methodology: Evaluation on basic knowledge of plagiarism avoidance I MP A C T A N A L Y S I S Pre-workshop assessment Group discussion withexamples Workshop on plagiarism Avoidance Evaluation on the effects of the workshop Post-workshop assessment Evaluation of the “reception” Post-workshop Feedback

7. Scenarios: • Verbatim quote without proper acknowledgement • Verbatim quote in parenthesis with indirect acknowledgement • Inappropriate use of verbatim quote but with proper acknowledgement • Appropriate paraphrasing with proper acknowledgement • Appropriate use of information changed to the context without in-text referencing • identifying “Patchwork” • Proper use of diagram with acknowledgement • Proper use of diagram with acknowledgement • Use of secondary sources without reading the primary source • Use of information that are considered to be common knowledge

8. Results:

9. Results: 63.2% 315 (45%) 241 (34.4%) 128 (18.2%) 17 (2.4%)

10. Results - Feedback: 97.7% *Only 381 students have given the feedback

11. Student feed back How do you describe this session? • ‘Learnt a lot about plagiarism’ • ‘Learning about plagiarism was interesting’ • I learnt things I didn’t know about’ • I thought as long as I do not cut-and-paste it is fine but only now I know how to paraphrase, reference etc. • ‘It is bit terrifying and also boring’ • ‘Not enough pupil participation’ • If writing is going to be this hard, why didn’t they explain this earlier during my GCSC’s • It looks like I got to give reference to everything I use!

12. Personal Reflexions: • “The workshop only introduces the problems but not entirely focusing the subject” • This was due to the time limitation (maximum allowed one hour) • “Identifying correctly doesn’t mean they are capable of avoiding” • Agree but at least I have tried to enhance awareness • “Most of the scenarios used are simple and obvious” • “Yet 274 students (4%) only managed to identify 3 or less pre-workshop scenarios” • “No rigorous analysis to prove the “effectiveness” of the workshop • 51% of students who managed to identify less than 5 scenarios in pre-workshop assessment were able to correctly identify all 5 scenarios in post-workshop evaluation.

13. Reviewers Conclusions:

14. Conclusions: • The majority of school children do know the basic concepts of plagiarism. • They need to be educated the “fine points” on how to avoid plagiarism. • Promoting anti-plagiarism activities amongst school children would enhance their effective learning.