Are you concerned that your students will plagiarize? Do you know that there are powerful ways to combat common reasons why students plagiarize?
Assignment scaffolding can help students avoid time management problems by providing intermediate deadlines to help them work toward a final project. Careful assignment design can help mitigate students’ feeling that they lack the expertise to complete an assignment. For example, asking students to apply course concepts to their own lives or to write to classmates as their audience is much less intimidating than explaining difficult ideas to a teacher who already knows the subject.
Sometimes students do not fully understand plagiarism or do not know how to cite sources. Use the plagiarism tutorial and test to help students recognize and avoid plagiarism. Writing Tutorial Services has guides for students. Because notions of plagiarism differ from culture to culture and even from course to course, be sure to explain explicitly what counts as plagiarism in your course.
Instructors report that using Turnitin acts as a deterrent, but can also educate students about proper citation and paraphrasing methods. Enable Turnitin in Canvas and connect it to individual assignments.
Librarians can help instructors design effective research projects and help students throughout the research process. A librarian can also help create a course guide to support students throughout the assignment.
To learn more, you can attend the Preventing Plagiarism Workshop at the CITL. Also visit the CITL website about discouraging plagiarism. Know a colleague who might benefit from this information? CITL encourages you to share this information with your friends and colleagues.
–John Paul Kanwit, Madeleine Gonin
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