By: Andrew Barrett
As a relatively new member of the Educational Development Centre who is also trying wrap-up a dissertation in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, I find myself wearing two hats.
When wearing my Manager, Instructional Innovations hat, the shampoo bottle instructions version of what I do could be summarized as follows: (1) Identify problems faced by members of Carleton’s teaching and learning community, (2) Look for instructional innovation that can address these problems, (3) Help with the deployment/adoption of these innovations, (4) Rinse and repeat.
When wearing my Doctoral Candidate hat, my focus is much more narrow. My dissertation investigates the efficiency, reliability and validity of a new way of calibrating test items in variable-length computerized classification tests. While few might find this to be exciting stuff, the context of my research might be of more general interest.
The context in which I’m collecting data for my dissertation is the online test associated with Indiana University Plagiarism Tutorial. Plagiarism in higher education is a unique topic for which I can wear both my hats comfortably and, as such, provides a good topic for my first blog post on the EDC website.
In this post, I’ll briefly outline the problem of plagiarism and explain why I think behaviours associated with plagiarism prevention should be considered an innovation. In my next post, I’ll present a way that adoption of plagiarism prevention can be encouraged in the context of best practices from diffusion of innovations research.
Plagiarism is a problem faced by educational institutions around the world that is not just limited to undergraduate students. Learning proper ways to cite sources is an important part of graduate education. And, with incidents of plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct in peer-reviewed journals on the rise, plagiarism is an issue that can have serious repercussions for faculty members either as journal editors or as authors contributing articles to a journal. The problem of plagiarism is made more complex by the reality that different cultures view plagiarism differently.
Like other issues of academic integrity (e.g. respecting copyright), addressing plagiarism violations after they have occurred can be exponentially more costly than preventing it in the first place. From a teacher’s perspective, dealing with a case of plagiarism can take a considerable investment of time and energy. Gathering the evidence, confronting the student and potentially escalating the violation to university authorities are neither trivial nor enjoyable tasks. From a student’s perspective, the consequences can range from a zero on an assignment to failing a course or even dismissal from a program. Putting a price on the negative consequences of being caught or catching someone plagiarizing would be difficult but it is fair to assume that the cost is high.
The cost of plagiarism prevention is measured primarily in time. It takes time to build awareness among students about the problem of plagiarism. Learning to cite, quote and reference properly to avoid plagiarism takes additional time. It could be argued that time devoted to plagiarism prevention is time taken away from pursuing other course learning outcomes, but it would be difficult to find a course where learning how to avoid plagiarism would not be connected to the established learning outcomes.
In comparison to the costs associated with detecting and dealing with plagiarism, prevention seems like a great deal. As an added bonus, educational efforts aimed at helping individuals understand and avoid plagiarism align well with various broader goals of higher education related to ethical behaviour in society. Despite the advantages of prevention over detection and punishment alone, more effort has been dedicated towards developing tools for detecting plagiarism than towards prevention strategies. Detection will always be an important and necessary tool for curbing plagiarism, however, detection alone is not sufficient.
The behaviours associated with avoiding plagiarism can be thought of as an innovation that people can choose to adopt or not. When we think of innovations, images of a new smart phone or other electronic device often come to mind. Less obvious but equally valid innovations are behaviours such as boiling water before consumption or a specific farming technique that may or may not involve particular technologies. Plagiarism prevention can be thought of as an innovation that involves adoption of specific behaviours.
If plagiarism prevention can be considered an innovation, how do we encourage adoption? Fortunately, the way that organizations and cultures adopt innovations has been studied extensively and there are a variety of strategies that can be used to increase the rate of innovation adoption. My next post will focus on a few aspects of diffusion of innovations theory and how they could inform efforts to encourage adoption of plagiarism prevention.