The only study that I am aware of in terms of what students are taught at the high school level is an old one by Dant (1986).  In a Psi Chi poster at EPA last year, one of my students and I reported that few schools provide coverage of plagiarism in their college catalogues/student handbooks.  In my view, the coverage provided is less than adequate.

I agree that we must teach our students proper writing and citation skills, but we must also place strong emphasis on why these skills are important.  The overriding message I hear from students is that when it comes to cheating: "It's just not a big deal". 

Most of us probably can do a good job at teaching these skills.  Where I think we have not been as successful is in convincing students why academic and general personal integrity ARE/SHOULD BE a big deal.

Reference

Dant. D. (1986).  Plagiarism in high school.  English Journal, LLXXV(2), 81-84.

Miguel

At 08:02 AM 5/4/2004 -0500, you wrote:
I see that it apparently does search through many of the kinds of online sources my students are likely to plagiarize from, so I take back my comment that it would be useless in my situation. Still it strikes me that the problem is better addressed by us doing a better job of teaching students what they're supposed to be doing than by us catching and penalizing them after the fact.
 
I also think that this is a place for one of those outreach projects to other levels of education. It seems clear that a significant part of the problem is that we not only fail to teach this properly to students, but that at some levels the use of sources is sometimes taught exactly the wrong way, with students essentially told that their job is to find relevant quotes and string them together. What exactly do we know about how our students are taught about this earlier in their academic careers?
 
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Roig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 10:33 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
Subject: Re: Caught Cheating

At 05:27 AM 5/4/2004 -0500, you wrote:
"The most serious limitation of turnitin.com is that it does not check
scientific references - that is journal articles (at least it didn't use
to).
Yes, but their capabilities are expanding.  I plucked the paragraph below from the Turnitin web site http://www.turnitin.com/static/about_us/whats_new.html:

"Best Search Available. Turnitin has expanded its search capabilities to include the articles from thousands of commercial publications. This includes all of the published material contained in ProQuest�'s ABI/Inform, full-text Periodical Abstracts, and Business Dateline. It also includes tens of thousands of books from some of the largest digital libraries available. This is a free service to new and existing Turnitin customers."

I understand that the above feature was only added recently.

Miguel

___________________________________________________________________________
Miguel Roig, Ph.D.                              
Associate Professor of Psychology               
Notre Dame Division of St. John's College       
St. John's University                           
300 Howard Avenue                               
Staten Island, New York 10301
Voice: (718) 390-4513
Fax: (718) 390-4347
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm
On plagiarism and ethical writing: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/
___________________________________________________________________________
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