Educating undergraduate students to identify plagiarism in ecology

Background/Question/Methods

Numerous self-reported rates of past cheating behaviors by students, including plagiarism, hover around 50%. Student plagiarism, however, is a mutual problem shared by educators and their students. With the present study, I hoped to identify the source of inadvertent plagiarism in ecology and investigate how educators can reduce it. Specifically, my main goals were to determine: 1) how successfully ecology students can identify plagiarism; 2) if plagiarism training improves students’ ability to identify plagiarism; 3) if readability of the material (i.e., sentence structure, word length and scientific terminology) affects students’ ability to recognize plagiarism; and 4) how varying severities of plagiarism influence students’ ability to discern plagiarized material from properly quoted, paraphrased and attributed material. Through voluntary surveys, 54 students served as a control group and received no formal training of plagiarism avoidance throughout the semester, while the remaining 94 students were trained with a writing assignment. The assignment specifically provided definitions of plagiarism, guidelines and examples of proper quotation, proper citations (according to the Council of Science Editors), proper paraphrasing, and required that students demonstrate proficiency in plagiarism avoidance.

Results/Conclusions

I found 148 undergraduate ecology students failed to identify plagiarism or misidentified properly quoted, paraphrased or attributed material as plagiarism roughly a quarter of the time. At the end of the semester, students that received plagiarism training performed significantly better at plagiarism detection than those who did not receive training (F_1,2684 = 13.79, P < 0.001). Most students, independent of training, identified properly paraphrased, quoted and attributed material but had much greater difficulty identifying paraphrases that included long strings of text, up to 15 words, or proper paraphrases lacking citations. Improvement due to training was not affected by the complexity of sentence structure or inclusion of scientific jargon (P = 0.0686) or by the severity of plagiarism (P = 0.1254). Misunderstanding of paraphrasing and citation conventions could manifest as unintentional student plagiarism. Consequently, more work is needed to understand what types of education will have the greatest learning gains and have long-term retention.