Today my online teacher and I had an interesting discussion about teaching middle school kids the principles of academic integrity. We agreed that our fifth and sixth grade students have difficulty understanding the concept of intellectual property and thus struggle to know when they're taking it without permission. We also agreed that the process of learning the definitions plagiarism must begin during these years, with gentle but consistent guidance from teachers. Most students conduct their first independent research projects in fifth or sixth grades. Prior to that, most of these students freely lifted information from books, electronic resources, teachers, parents, etc. and reported it without crediting a single source. Rarely are young students asked to provide bibliographies with reports or projects; a list of "books you used" is the typical extent of an elementary school reference list. Fifth and sixth graders become confused when they are suddenly asked to quote, cite, paraphrase, and list references. Definitions of plagiarism, Brainpop movies on paraphrasing, and lectures from teachers introduce the concept of intellectual property, but practice seems to be the only way kids internalize the concept.
We discussed the ways we teach academic honesty. My teacher is currently working on a project designed to teach kids about plagiarism more effectively. We also discussed ways we detect plagiarism and the appropriate consequences for those that take what isn't theirs. I wondered if virtual school students plagiarize more often than students in face-to-face classrooms, as almost every virtual school website I've seen directly addresses intellectual honesty. From our conversation, I gathered the answer is no. I suspect virtual school teachers are on the lookout for plagiarism more than brick and mortar teachers, and want to be clear about expectations on their websites.
My teacher discussed how she regularly uses a service called Turnitin. It sounds like a wonderful tool for detecting plagiarism and helping young students learn the how to follow the rules. I've never used it in my classroom. I found it interesting that virtual school kids are not expelled from the program if they cheat; they suffer the same consequences that classroom cheaters experience.
In an electronic world, lessons on academic integrity must be learned early and well. The staff at the virtual school are leading the way by teaching young students the art of giving due credit to everyone who creates content.
4 comments:
As an online teacher for over 7 years I can tell you that kids do cheat. Is it more prevalent than in the traditional face to face classroom? Not in my experience. I think that it's wonderful that you are teaching kids about plagiarism, copyright etc. It is definitely a skill set that they will need. As for turnitin.com, there has been some controversy to the service, mostly related to how it keeps the papers in its database. It's quite ironic if you think about it, a company profits by providing a service that takes kids intellectual property and keeps it in a database to make sure that other kids don't try to pass it along as their own.
Jeanne-
This post gives me hope. I currently teach Senior English and have several students every year who attempt to plagiarize their Senior Project research paper. A few have even had the audacity to cut and paste entire articles from the Internet, with nary a change in wording or format. Now, while a few understand this is wrong and do it anyway, some of them just simply don't understand the idea of intellectual property as you mentioned. I've found that discussing music with them helps, or even movies, and helping them to think about stealing lyrics or movie scene elements and not giving credit. But I'm glad to know that the teacher you are working with teaches a curriculum that has students learning this even before middle school. Starting this as early as possible is all the better and I know it's possible. In both fifth and sixth grade I had to do a Daughters of the American Revolution research paper and had to use note cards, provide in-text citations and do a bibliography. I think teachers delay teaching the need for giving proper credit, assuming that students are too young to understand, but I don't think that's the case. I'm sure that the students in the class you're dealing with will be much better off learning about it now, rather than later. Because ideas are so powerful, giving proper respect for their ownership and origination is not something to take lightly. Perhaps these students won't be those who are attempting to cut and paste the work of others or buy pre-written essays and papers off the Web. Good work.
Justin
I also applaud the treatment of plagiarism and academic honesty in the virtual and face-to-face classroom. I personally believe this content should be started much earlier than middle school. We have been working hard at my school to address this as early as kindergarten. Students are writing paragraphs in second grade, some of which include content from books. Teachers do discuss the importance of giving credit to resources at this point. In third grade, the students write 5 paragraph essays for which they must have at least one book, one reference resource, and one online resource. We teach them the proper bibliographic citations one at a time. It's a painstaking process, but definitely worth it. This is reinforced through all the grades. (I work at a k-12 school.) We still have cheating, but there is no doubt that the students who are doing it know very well that it is wrong. They just make a decision to take the risk.
Some believe that copyright should be more flexible because the Internet offers such low cost distribution channels. With Creative Commons, Open Source, controversies over digital rights management (DRM), and projects like The League of Noble Peers' "Steal this Film", intellectual property is being pushed to its conceptual limits. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
I know for me intellectual property and copyright are confusing on a philosophical level...in terms of where to draw the line on what constitutes one's own work when every single thing that we create is probably consciously or unconsciously informed in some way by someone else's work or behavior. I think many children have similar thoughts even if they can't articulate it. They see examples of 'influences' in art and such, so they wonder why isn't that illegal? Their common sense doesn't mesh with the realities of the laws. What a challenging subject to teach!
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