Krista Sarraf: hi everybody i'm Krista Sarraf, and i'm here today to talk about fostering ethical source use.
Krista Sarraf: So my role is the SpeakWrite specialist in the Eberly college of arts and sciences and the SpeakWrite program is designed to help professors and in Eberly to integrate speaking and writing throughout their their disciplines and in their curriculum.
Krista Sarraf: So this discussion today is going to focus on plagiarism. A problem that many of us face is that students do not summarize or paraphrase correctly and then they're writing is too close to the original and when they do integrate sources, they really struggle with documentation.
Krista Sarraf: As academics, we typically write and publish all the time and, over time, we've learned how to use style manuals and document our sources.
Krista Sarraf: Plus we're familiar with the discourse and language in our own fields as well as our discipline's jargon and a lot of the research.
Krista Sarraf: So, putting academic articles in our own words, is kind of second nature. Our students should be able to do this, too, right?
Krista Sarraf: Well, not so fast so students struggle with citation and plagiarism for a lot of reasons. First, a lot of times you'll see students before they've taken the required English classes, English 101, 102, or 103
Krista Sarraf: At West Virginia university and those classes teach citation conventions, though, most of them teach APA and MLA.
Krista Sarraf: They're not required to teach both, and sometimes students can choose which citation style they want to learn.
Krista Sarraf: Since most students are comfortable with MLA because they've learned it in high school they might be less familiar with the citation style of your field, like Chicago.
Krista Sarraf: Plus imagine that you're a student who's brand new to the discipline and you've been asked to read a scientific journal article. Where do you even start? some of these skills that are second nature to us are really tough for students to master and that leads to unethical source use.
Krista Sarraf: In this presentation, I'd like us to get on the same page about what counts is plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: Explore different types of unethical source use, especially those that may be unintentional like patch writing or documentation errors and using genre moves.
Krista Sarraf: Then we'll talk about different models to foster ethical source use and explore activities and resources that you can use in your classes.
Krista Sarraf: So let's start with defining plagiarism and you might pause the video or think to yourself, what do you think of when you think of plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: You might also consider how you approach plagiarism so what strategies do you have an in place to prevent plagiarism by teaching students, as well as how do you deal with it, when you think that there's a case of plagiarism?
Krista Sarraf: So one problem that we face is that even defining plagiarism is a complex task. On one hand, we have our institutional policy that says that even incorrect or partial citations are plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: But on the other hand, writing scholars argue that we should distinguish between
Krista Sarraf: plagiarism that is deliberate and what happens when students are learning and struggle to learn citation conventions. On the screen, here we have the wvu policy
Krista Sarraf: And the Council of writing program administration is an organization that again distinguishes between instructional settings and more deliberate types of of plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: .
Krista Sarraf: So, in terms of the different types, one of the reasons that it's actually really key to distinguish between types of plagiarism is that we teach and prevent these really differently.
Krista Sarraf: So when students intentionally plagiarize they often submit papers, they already wrote for other classes, or that someone else altogether wrote.
Krista Sarraf: We address this problem by creating assignments that demand fresh content by changing up our assignments, and by engaging students in drafting and revising.
Krista Sarraf: But when students unintentionally plagiarize they do these other things that we're talking about today, like patch writing or they have documentation errors and we address that by explicitly teaching reading and writing skills.
Krista Sarraf: There are a lot of different causes of unintentional plagiarism. Students might not know how to take effective notes or they may not understand what they read.
Krista Sarraf: When they're new to the discipline, they may not understand jargon and know how to put it in their own words.
Krista Sarraf: Also, some students may be new to the cultural expectations of the United States, where we tend to prize individual intellectual property.
Krista Sarraf: And some disciplines also regularly remix or use generic language, such as such as in some lab reports, and finally there's just a learning curve.
Krista Sarraf: Sometimes, we assign projects that require sources without teaching source use, and when all this happens it's a perfect storm and we may see patch writing documentation errors or incorrect genre move usage.
Krista Sarraf: let's look at the issue of patch writing. Patch writing occurs when students paraphrase too closely to an original text.
Krista Sarraf: So let's look at patch writing in context of these other types of source use. first we have on the top left hand side of the screen exact copying.
Krista Sarraf: Then paraphrasing, then summary. Now consider patch writing. Patch writing is problematic because it does mean students are using other people's words without proper attribution.
Krista Sarraf: On the other hand, there's also evidence that suggests that this is something students do as they try and read a complicated text so, in other words, yes patch rating is
Krista Sarraf: Technically, a form of incorrect citation use. It's likely, though, that it's not deliberate because it's what students do when they're trying to understand what they're reading.
Krista Sarraf: So obviously though we want students to be able to fully incorrectly paraphrase and summarize since that demonstrates their understanding of what they read, and it also aligns with the concept of ethical source use.
Krista Sarraf: So in the original source on the right side of the screen the students have the student has
Krista Sarraf: On the left side attempted to change it, so this is an example of Patch writing. so notice the highlighted words, so the student
Krista Sarraf: said studies show that children, whereas the original said studies have shown that, and so you can see in the highlighted text that there is a lot of really similar language here, and this is an example of patch writing.
Krista Sarraf: This is another example where the student took the original language, changed it, and put it in quote marks, but then they didn't document it and so again, this is an issue of both patch writing and incorrect
Krista Sarraf: citation because they need a citation for the quotes. Also the first sentence is almost the same in both versions, but they use a different sentence structure so that's also problematic.
Krista Sarraf: Instead, we want students to practice paraphrasing, which is what we have on the screen here.
Krista Sarraf: And here's an example of a correct paraphrase so you might pause the screen and compare the differences, and i've highlighted keywords to show that, even with correct paraphrasing, we don't need students to change simple keywords that are really just content based like parents or parenting.
Krista Sarraf: So how can we address patch writing? one thing you can do is to have students write informally in class, so that they get used to the sources and the jargon, of the field and begin to really understand what they're reading and writing about.
Krista Sarraf: We can also ask students to write more than one draft, knowing that the early draft will display patch writing and as they think about their sources and talk about them students will be able to move towards proper paraphrasing and attribution.
Krista Sarraf: Finally, we might ask students to work more closely, but with fewer sources so that they really have time to digest what they're reading.
Krista Sarraf: Another problem that we see is errors and documentation.
Krista Sarraf: In Lunsford in Lunsford's 2008 large scale study, they identify the 20 errors that appeared appeared most frequently and undergraduate student writing.
Krista Sarraf: Of the 20, 3 related to citation and sources. so number three was emitting the original source, so incomplete or missing documentation. Number six was a mechanical error, with a quote.
Krista Sarraf: And number 18 is poorly integrated quotation, so the grammar of the quotation, maybe doesn't match the grammar of the neighboring prose.
Krista Sarraf: So here we have an example of two common types of documentation errors. On the left, we have a missing page number.
Krista Sarraf: And on the right, we have a missing author and year. We also have a poorly integrated quote that appears without an introductory text. So again, you might pause and look through this.
Krista Sarraf: So to address documentation errors what you might do is actually use TurnItIn but use it as an activity to teach students.
Krista Sarraf: So have students submit their papers to TurnItIn during the draft and then have students use the similarity report to correct their writing, so using it as a teaching tool, instead of a way to punish and detect plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: You might also point students to the plagiarism avoidance tutorial on the WVU library website which you can also integrate into your course shell.
Krista Sarraf: You might have students do a scavenger hunt where they look through the different style manuals and try to find out how to cite common types of sources, and you could also have students track patterns of error which we have a handout for on the SpeakWrite website.
Krista Sarraf: Okay, so as writers, we use genre moves, which are common ways of saying things and that's Okay, but the problem occurs here when students use genre moves that are too close to the source text, so this is kind of a third type of unintentional
Krista Sarraf: source use, that is, that is technically plagiarism, but that is really an opportunity for us to teach our students.
Krista Sarraf: So here's an example of different genre moves, so I have highlighted "take up this call" or "calls for" so a lot of times whenever we are
Krista Sarraf: writing a research paper, and we want other researchers to kind of build on our research, we might use an expression like this.
Krista Sarraf: And both examples use variations of the phrase "calls for" which isn't plagiarism at all because that's a really typical move that writers make in the genre of an academic paper.
Krista Sarraf: But if a student does this they might be doing it when they're incorrectly paraphrasing.
Krista Sarraf: So, for example, you can see the paraphrase here, so in this case the students trying to paraphrase Alexander and shavers piece, in which case the students should change the words take up right because it's too similar.
Krista Sarraf: So to address genre move issues we can give students multiple examples of sample texts, have a lesson on reading like a writer, so they learn genre moves,
Krista Sarraf: And again showing students, how to interpret a turn it in report because sometimes genre moves will be highlighted as plagiarism even when they're not.
Krista Sarraf: So far, we've talked about common ways students use sources and talked about activities to address each so now let's set it look at different models of setting up our courses.
Krista Sarraf: So, here are some different ways to approach ethical source use. On one hand, we have compliance based models of teaching and we also have instruction based models.
Krista Sarraf: So, in a class that uses a compliance based model the instructor assigns writing, detects plagiarism, and reports it.
Krista Sarraf: The benefits are that it doesn't take the instructor much time and that it does penalize intentional plagiarizers.
Krista Sarraf: But the cons are that it's reactive it's so instead of preventative it's reacting to students, it's punitive even for students who are unintentionally plagiarizing, and it lacks nuance because, again, it doesn't detect the difference between intentional and unintentional plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: So I highly recommend that as an instructor, we consider that we all shift towards instruction based ethical use so that means you assign writing, you teach how to read carefully and how to
Krista Sarraf: cite sources and paraphrase, you ask students to apply to their work, you ask students to revise and then, if there's still problems, if necessary, you report.
Krista Sarraf: So the pros are that your students will learn new skills and it reduces unintentional plagiarism but the cons are instructor time.
Krista Sarraf: But it can also be frustrating, because you might be hoping that students learn this in their English classes.
Krista Sarraf: And while it's true that students need to learn these concepts in their English classes i'll remind you a few things.
Krista Sarraf: So one is that you might see students before they've taken both of the first year writing courses that are required here
Krista Sarraf: in which case they might not be well versed in citation styles.
Krista Sarraf: Also, when students are new to your discipline, they might need to learn new conventions and then you know they're learning, they're learning to read content in your discipline and so
Krista Sarraf: Sometimes, really, focusing in on teaching paraphrasing and summarizing in your discipline can help students better under understand the course content.
Krista Sarraf: So we've talked about these different best practices and here just a review of them, so you might want to distinguish between deliberate plagiarism and misuse of sources.
Krista Sarraf: Also, have bigger conversations with your students about plagiarism.
Krista Sarraf: We typically focus only on plagiarism but we divorce the conversation about plagiarism from the original goal, which is about protecting intellectual property so talk to students about why we cite,
Krista Sarraf: and talk about plagiarism, tell them that they have intellectual property that they also will will get to protect.
Krista Sarraf: it's also important to note that in play in school context plagiarism has really become an ethical construct where in the public world plagiarism is a legal term.
Krista Sarraf: So it's important to teach students to value their own work as intellectual property before teaching them to value the work of others.
Krista Sarraf: We might also place a nuanced plagiarism policy on the syllabus, teach citation conventions, teach reading skills, and teach the writing process.
Krista Sarraf: I suggest that you use an academic integrity policy that reflects both the institution's definition of plagiarism and an instruction based approach and so here's an example on the screen that you can use.
Krista Sarraf: And you can also do various activities with your students, so you could have students write in class, you might design assignments that require deep reading
Krista Sarraf: of a few sources, you can assign library modules at the beginning of the semester.
Krista Sarraf: You could do that at the beginning, which might prevent issues or you can wait until students turn into a piece of writing, and if you see frequent issues with unethical source use, you can assign the library module,
Krista Sarraf: require that students complete it and take the quizzes and apply what they learned to correct their writing. So this can be effective because it gives students and authentic opportunity to apply what they learned in the library module.
Krista Sarraf: We also have several resources available to you through SpeakWrite and some of them are listed here, but the key is that you can visit our website speakwrite.wvu.edu to find all of these resources, thank you and happy teaching.