Teaching the Copy and Paste Generation
It’s 10 p.m. and a 10th grader we’ll call Jesse has been trying to complete a school research paper for the last few hours. Like many of his friends, he’s been checking his Facebook page and listening to music while he writes. There should be an easier way to get this done, he thinks. He texts a friend for advice. The response…
“Google it and copy.”
In a world where quick answers are the norm, the time it takes to actually do research, take notes, draw conclusions, and finally, write conclusions all down in grammatically correct form may seem overwhelming. Plagiarism is an easy way out for many students.
The open access to wikis and shared sources like Creative Commons has somehow lessened the importance of intellectual property. Basically, you can get just about anything off the Internet, legal or not.
As educators in the digital age, how do we teach our students that using research materials to acquire knowledge and then using that knowledge to draw logical conclusions is totally acceptable, but that claiming another’s ideas as one’s own are two totally different things? One is legal. One is not.
The next challenge is to be sure students are given the information, understand it, and are held accountable for the materials they include in papers.
One great reference for teaching students about plagiarism is Education World’s Student’s Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism. There are plenty of other resources to help teachers instruct their students about the slippery slope of plagiarism, not only from a legal sense, but from an ethical perspective.
Dr. C. Barnbaum in the Department of Physics and Astronomy suggests that there are five types of plagiarism, but none as popular with K-12 student researchers as the ever “copy and paste” method.
There will always be students in our classrooms who want the easy way out. With a thorough explanation of the actual guidelines for citing and quoting intellectual property, we have some chance of helping students learn the rules of research and attribution. We can help teach students like Jesse that it’s important to draw his own conclusions, cultivating the critical thinking skills imperative to a successful future.
What safeguards do you have in place in your school to combat plagiarism, and how can you be sure students know the rules?