Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Articles
  • Op-eds
  • Videos
  • Learning Styles FAQ
  • Daniel Willingham: Science and Education Blog

Teaching students about plagiarism reduces plagiarism.

4/16/2012

 
Most colleges have strict polices about student plagiarism, often including stringent penalties for those who violate the rules. (At the University of Virginia, where I teach, the penalty is expulsion.) Yet infractions occur. Why?

My own intuition has been that plagiarism is often due to oversight or panic. A student will fall behind and, with a deadline looming, get sloppy in the writing of a paper: a few sentences or even a paragraph makes its way into the student paper without attribution. In the rush to finish the student forgets about it, or decides it doesn't matter.

Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob had a different idea.

Some data (e.g., Power, 2009) indicate that even college students are not very knowledgeable about what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it, and so many instances of plagiarism may actually be accidental.

Given the stiff penalties, why don't students bone up on the rules? Dee & Jacob point out that this may be an instance of rational ignorance.  That is, it's logical for students not to try to obtain better information about plagiarism; the cost of learning this information is relatively high because the rules seem complex, and the payoff seems small because the odds of punishment for plagiarism are low.

Dee and Jacob's idea: reduce plagiarism by reducing the cost of learning about what constitutes plagiarism.

Their experiment included 1,256 papers written by 573 students in a total of 28 humanities and social-science courses during a semester a selective liberal arts college. Half of the students were required to complete a "short but detailed interactive tutorial on understanding and avoiding plagiarism."

The student papers were analyzed with plagiarism detection software. In the control group, plagiarism was observed in 3.3 percent of papers. (Almost every instance was a matter of using sentences without attribution.) Students who had completed the tutorial had a plagiarism rate of about 1.3% 

Thus, a relatively simple and quite inexpensive intervention may be highly effective in reducing at least one variety of plagiarism. Replicating this finding in other types of coursework--science and mathematics--would be important, as would replication at other institutions, including less selective colleges, and high schools. Even with those limitations, this is a promising start.

This paper was just published as:

Dee, T. S. & Jacob, B. A. (2012) Rational ignorance in education: A field experiment in student plagiarism. Journal of Human Resources, 47, 397-434.

(I've linked to the NBER publication above because it's freely downloadable.)

Power, L. G. (2009). University Students’ Perceptions of Plagiarism. Journal of Higher Education, 80, 643-662.
Marta L.
4/17/2012 01:50:07 pm

A very interesting study. One question that occurred to me was this: how do you distinguish the effect due to education as opposed to the effect of knowing that plagiarism is a true priority for your professor? If I was a student and had to compete a tutorial as part of a specific course, I think that would make me assume this professor didn't mess around with plagiarism - wouldn't that affect things a bit?

Daniel Willingham link
4/17/2012 10:49:47 pm

Marta, that's a really good point. A couple of thoughts. (1) we might say "ok, maybe the students are just more concerned that the professor will catch them. . .at least the intervention still works!" But of course if the intervenetion is working by fear, not education, we'd suspect that it would only work for this class. (2) on the other hand, the fact that other data indicate that at least some students are ignorant about aspects of plagiarism makes it at least plausible that the effect is one of education, not fear.
But all this is speculation--I think you're right, it's really something that should be evaluated empirically in future work.

Tom Dee
4/22/2012 04:42:05 am

Thanks for your thoughtful write-up of this, Dan. Marta, that's an excellent question. We were also concerned about whether the effect of the tutorial was due to "human capital" (i.e., learning more about what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, etc.) or deterrence (i.e., being scared straight by the mere presence of the tutorial).

So, we administered a survey to the students in the study shortly after the semester. We found that those randomly assigned to the treatment didn't perceive significantly higher probabilities of detection, punishment conditional on detection, etc. But they did demonstrate more knowledge about plagiarism (based on a few quiz questions). So, there's some evidence that the tutorial worked more through education than deterrence. :-)

Dan Willingham link
4/23/2012 08:05:39 am

Nothing like having the expert himself come by to straighten out the blogger. Thanks, Tom, for highlighting that important point I missed!

learn spanish online link
7/29/2012 09:56:43 pm

I have read the article, and I want to say thanks to you for exceptional information. You have provided deep and easily understandable knowledge to us.

unlock blackberry 9810 link
8/8/2012 12:39:21 am

Thanks for the FANTASTIC post! This information is really good and thanks a ton for sharing it :-)
I m looking forward desperately for the next post of yours.


Comments are closed.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    RSS Feed


    Purpose

    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

    Archives

    April 2022
    July 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    December 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012

    Categories

    All
    21st Century Skills
    Academic Achievement
    Academic Achievement
    Achievement Gap
    Adhd
    Aera
    Animal Subjects
    Attention
    Book Review
    Charter Schools
    Child Development
    Classroom Time
    College
    Consciousness
    Curriculum
    Data Trustworthiness
    Education Schools
    Emotion
    Equality
    Exercise
    Expertise
    Forfun
    Gaming
    Gender
    Grades
    Higher Ed
    Homework
    Instructional Materials
    Intelligence
    International Comparisons
    Interventions
    Low Achievement
    Math
    Memory
    Meta Analysis
    Meta-analysis
    Metacognition
    Morality
    Motor Skill
    Multitasking
    Music
    Neuroscience
    Obituaries
    Parents
    Perception
    Phonological Awareness
    Plagiarism
    Politics
    Poverty
    Preschool
    Principals
    Prior Knowledge
    Problem-solving
    Reading
    Research
    Science
    Self-concept
    Self Control
    Self-control
    Sleep
    Socioeconomic Status
    Spatial Skills
    Standardized Tests
    Stereotypes
    Stress
    Teacher Evaluation
    Teaching
    Technology
    Value-added
    Vocabulary
    Working Memory