Editors' Introduction: Language Rights and Educational Access at the Crossroads,Past and Present

The debate about what constitutes plagiarism and how it should be dealt with in the academy continues to gain momentum. The response from many higher education institutions is to channel ever-increasing amounts of resources into plagiarism detection technologies, rather than trying to ascertain why plagiarism might be occurring in the first place. In this article, drawing on a wide range of data from student assignments and interviews with staff and students, we argue that it would be preferable to do away with the notion of plagiarism in favour of an understanding of transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality. Once textual borrowings are seen in this light, we are more able to focus on the crucial issues of writing, identity, power, knowledge, disciplinary dynamics, and discourse that underlie intertextuality. We conclude that judgements about the nature of intertextuality are contextually contingent; they should also be understood as part of a broader account of institutional regulation and student resistance, interdisciplinarity, and the mediation of discourse.     

Exploring staff perceptions of student plagiarism

This paper presents analysis of qualitative data from a research project looking at staff perceptions of plagiarism at a post‐1992 university. Twenty‐six members of staff from departments and academic schools from across the university took part in open and semi‐structured interviews. Analysis shows that variable definitions of plagiarism exist; both regarding student activities that constitute plagiarism and the way in which plagiarism is perceived to be related to cheating. The factors underlying these personal definitions are unclear, but the analysis suggests that values perceived to underpin higher education may play an important role. This paper provides new empirical data on staff perceptions of student plagiarism, which complement previous research on student perceptions. The potential implications of different perceptions of plagiarism, and a mismatch between staff and student understandings is highlighted as an area for further consideration.     

Learning and teaching policies in higher education: mediations and contradictions of practice

Abstract This article utilises Rokeach's categorisation of values (i.e. moral, competency, personal and social) to analyse how values influence the choice of research method. It discusses how the ontological and epistemological position adopted by the researcher is influenced by their competency and personal values. The next section is concerned with the social values (or politics) of educational research, where the debate has polarised between those advocating a value‐neutral approach and those who argue that researchers should instead accept the partisan nature of research. Finally, the issue of research ethics is considered. Moral values are found to play an important role, but other values also influence the ethical decisions that are taken. The article concludes by highlighting how the complex interaction of the researcher's moral, competency, personal and social values has an important influence on the research process. The article contends that research methods cannot be value‐free in their application, but researchers should adopt a reflexive approach and attempt to be honest and open about how values influence their research.     

Judging plagiarism: a problem of morality and convention

This paper considers the problem of plagiarism as an issue of morality. Outrage about student plagiarism in universities positions it as dishonesty and a transgression of standards. Despite this, there has been little work analysing the implications of positioning plagiarism as a moral matter in the making of judgments about plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This paper sets the scene by reviewing research about the characteristics of students who cheat and analysing student and lecturer differences. It then discusses perspectives from moral behaviour, moral philosophy and moral reasoning. The paper concludes that emotion and reason are brought to moral judgments, and so makes a case for those who are making judgments about plagiarism to reflect on whether they are faced with a matter of morality or convention. Greater awareness of the domains of convention and morality, the issues of justice and care, the roles of emotion and reason and what is involved in making judgments, will open ways of understanding reactions to plagiarism so that better ways to deal with accusations and make judgments can be developed.     

Staff conceptions of curricular and extracurricular activities in higher education

This paper explores conceptions of curricular and extracurricular in UK higher education. Reporting on a case study of staff understandings of the extracurricular we argue that our data highlight the lack of debate about curricular matters. We found that there was considerable blurring of boundaries in conceptions of the curricular and extracurricular and argue that this is related to the lack of any stable or explicit conception of the curriculum in UK higher education. The paper highlights issues of recognition and non-recognition of the sorts of cultural capital which flow from traditional and other forms of extracurricular activities (ECA) and points to the continued gendering of caring and its valuing. Recognition of capital from within diverse communities and derived from activities which have not been traditionally conceptualised as ECA might contribute to graduate outcomes, but there are limitations to a politics of recognition. We argue that account also needs to be taken of the materiality of student lives and the constraints they face.     

An investigation into electronic‐source plagiarism in a first‐year essay assignment

Since the emergence of the electronic era, plagiarism has become an increasingly prevalent problem at tertiary institutions. This study investigated the role electronic sources of information played in influencing plagiarism in an essay assignment in a first‐year geography module at the University of KwaZulu‐Natal in South Africa. Despite explicit instruction in tutorials on academic writing, referencing and plagiarism, a quarter of students still plagiarised in their essay, with the majority having done so off the Internet. A survey questionnaire and interviews revealed that not only did the school writing experience prepare students poorly for academic writing discourses, but also highlighted that student ignorance with regard to acknowledgement of electronic sources, a pervasive perception of difference between electronic and print sources, as well as the availability of the copy‐and‐paste facility which reinforces the product view of writing, all contributed towards electronic‐source plagiarism. Active instructional engagement with electronic‐source material, and open dialogue on ownership of knowledge as well as on moral and ethical issues with students, are recommended as strategies to overcome such plagiarism.     

浅析大学生剽窃行为：基于国内外的文献

大学生剽窃行为是高等教育管理中的一个非常现实的问题,已经引起广大教育工作者和学术人员的广泛关注。大学生剽窃行为可以分为故意剽窃和无意剽窃。对于大学生如何看待剽窃问题上存在一些共性。大学生剽窃行为主要受道德能力、对剽窃的意识、学术融合和压力等9个因素的影响。与国外的大学生剽窃行为研究相比,我国的研究还有很长的路要走。     

Are we educating educators about academic integrity? A study of UK higher education textbooks

A substantial proportion of university students report committing plagiarism and related forms of misconduct. An academic integrity-focused approach to addressing plagiarism emphasises the promotion of positive values alongside education of staff and students about good, and bad, practice in writing, studying and assessment design. The concept was developed many years ago and is seen as desirable, yet it is not clear whether academic integrity features prominently in the education of academics themselves. We analysed source texts for postgraduate certificates in higher education (or equivalent) at UK universities. Overall, academic integrity was poorly addressed in these texts, and the language used (‘cheating’, ‘plagiarism’) was not reflective of an academic integrity-based approach. Newer issues, such as the purchasing of custom written assignments (contract cheating), were barely addressed. We conclude that the concept of academic integrity needs to be integrated into mainstream discourse around teaching in UK higher education.     

‘It’s not fair’: policy discourses and students’ understandings of plagiarism in a New Zealand university

Plagiarism is a concept that is difficult to define. Although most higher education institutions have policies aimed at minimising and addressing student plagiarism, little research has examined the ways in which plagiarism is discursively constructed in university policy documents, or the connections and disconnections between institutional and student understandings of plagiarism in higher education. This article reports on a study that explored students’ understandings of plagiarism in relation to institutional plagiarism discourses at a New Zealand university. The qualitative study involved interviews with 21 undergraduate students, and analysis of University plagiarism policy documents. The University policy documents revealed moral and regulatory discourses. In the interviews, students predominantly drew on ethico-legal discourses, which reflected the discourses in the policy documents. However, the students also drew on (un)fairness discourses, confusion discourses, and, to a lesser extent, learning discourses. Notably, learning discourses were absent in the University policy. Our findings revealed tensions between the ways plagiarism was framed in institutional policy documents, and students’ understandings of plagiarism and academic writing. We suggest that, in order to support students’ acquisition of academic writing skills, plagiarism should be framed in relation to ‘learning to write’, rather than as a moral issue.     

Can Turnitin be used to provide instant formative feedback?

New students face the challenge of making a smooth transition between school and university, and with regards to academic practice, there are often gaps between student expectations and university requirements. This study supports the use of the plagiarism detection service Turnitin to give students instant feedback on essays to help improve academic literacy. A student cohort (n = 76) submitted draft essays to Turnitin and received instruction on how to interpret the ‘originality report’ themselves for feedback. The impact of this self‐service approach was analysed by comparing the writing quality and incidence of plagiarism in draft and final essays, and comparing the results to a previous cohort (n = 80) who had not used Turnitin formatively. Student and staff perceptions were explored by interview and questionnaire. Using Turnitin formatively was viewed positively by staff and students, and although the incidence of plagiarism did not reduce because of a worsening of referencing and citation skills, the approach encouraged students to develop their writing. To conclude, students were positive of their experience of using Turnitin. Further work is required to understand how to use the self‐service approach more effectively to improve referencing and citation, and narrow the gap between student expectations and university standards.     

“Danger is Looming Here”.

The use by children and the young of alcohol, tobacco, films and pulp novels in the years before the outbreak of the First World War was a subject of extensive concern. The debate about tobacco, film and the pulp fiction took on the character of moral panics, while the alcohol issue remained a moral crusade which functioned as a kind of underlying sounding‐board for the three panics. Starting with the issue of children's tobacco smoking I give an account of the content and protagonists of the panics, their rhetoric and their views of children and the young. I argue that the panics not only helped to put into words an existing concern, especially about the children of the city, but that they also–as an extension of the new child psychology insights of the period–helped to draw up the contours of a new social group, the 14‐16‐year‐olds, who were to become far more visible in the course of the twentieth century. In addition the panics gave the teaching profession the opportunity to appear as experts on both children and the young.

     

The dark side of the exceptional: On moral exemplars,character education,and negative emotions

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this article, we first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. We make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments provided in the previous section. We go on to propose three educational strategies to foster NEREs’ positive moral role. In conclusion, we point out that an exemplarist approach to character education would greatly benefit from a more fine-grained account of the emotions involved in the educational process and from a broader perspective on which of these emotions should be taken as valuable for educational purposes.     

What to do about values in social research: the case for ethical reflexivity in the sociology of education

This paper is intended as a contribution to the longstanding debate about the best way of handling value judgements in social research. In it we make a case for more ‘ethical reflexivity’ in the sociology of education and argue that a systematic attention to value questions should be viewed as a taken‐for‐granted component of methodological rigour. We elucidate what we mean by ethical reflexivity, why we think it is important and suggest what it entails in practice. Our arguments are developed through a discussion of, and in contrast to, Martyn Hammersley’s analysis of the role of values in social research. The central problematic that the paper addresses is the tension between, on the one hand, the goal of insulating the research process from ‘value bias’ and, on the other hand, the goal of contributing to political and social change through research. We suggest that the reason for the intractability of the problem of values in social research is a persistent failure to recognise that, in practice, these two goals are inseparable. We argue that rigour in research demands that both these goals are taken seriously and we set out some of the challenges involved in trying to combine them.     

Book Reviews

This paper reviews an ongoing debate about moral standards for vocational education in German speaking countries. At the centre of the controversy is the question of universalistic versus domain‐specific moral orientations, namely the question of whether business people ought to develop different moral points of view in different situations (such as ‘private’ versus ‘professional’). Of pivotal importance in this context is also a prominent ethical approach (by Karl Homann, a philosopher in the tradition of liberal economists) which serves as a foundation for those who advocate domain specificity and which is strongly criticized by their counterparts. This approach is also presented, since the author believes that it does not entail all of what its protagonists claim. Moreover, as argued in the last section, the purported dichotomy of universalism versus domain specificity may even be entirely overcome. The point is that Homann's ethics perhaps do not fit into the framework of Kohlberg's six stages and might therefore be reconstructed as entailing moral segmentation. However, it is well accommodated by a more comprehensive stage taxonomy suggested by the author.     

Factors associated with student plagiarism in a post‐1992 university

A model intended to explain the incidence of plagiarism among undergraduates in the Business Studies department of a post‐1992 university was constructed and tested on a sample of 249 students completing Business Studies units at a post‐1992 university in Greater London. It was hypothesised that the occurrence of plagiarism could be predicted via three attitudinal considerations (individual perceptions of the ethicality of the practice, fear of penalties if caught and fear of failing a degree); two personal traits (goal orientation and academic integration), and three situational factors (financial, current grades achieved, and how strictly lecturing staff enforced anti‐plagiarism rules). Proposals concerning possible inter‐relations and interactions among these variables were also formulated and assessed.     

The mind of a plagiarist

The ease with which material may be ‘copied and pasted’ from the Internet into written work is raising concern in educational institutions, and particularly in those disciplines that use online sources and methods in their curriculum. A case of ‘serial plagiarism’ is discussed, in the work of a graduate student in an online distance education program. The complexity of the student’s thinking is emphasized, and the manner in which the case was handled by the teacher and the university. The use of an online plagiarism‐checking technology (Turnitin.com) and the value of such services are discussed. The case illustrates the importance of explaining the precise nature of plagiarism to students, of providing clear warnings about its consequences and of developing a careful institutional approach to plagiarism detection and prevention.     

The 'digital natives' debate: A critical review of the evidence

The idea that a new generation of students is entering the education system has excited recent attention among educators and education commentators. Termed 'digital natives' or the 'Net generation', these young people are said to have been immersed in technology all their lives, imbuing them with sophisticated technical skills and learning preferences for which traditional education is unprepared. Grand claims are being made about the nature of this generational change and about the urgent necessity for educational reform in response. A sense of impending crisis pervades this debate. However, the actual situation is far from clear. In this paper, the authors draw on the fields of education and sociology to analyse the digital natives debate. The paper presents and questions the main claims made about digital natives and analyses the nature of the debate itself. We argue that rather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a 'moral panic'. We propose that a more measured and disinterested approach is now required to investigate 'digital natives' and their implications for education.     

The “Write” Stuff: Simple Techniques Designed to Teach Students How to Avoid Plagiarism

Presently, plagiarism is a serious problem in academics. Research has shown that the number of students who commit some form of plagiarism has increased in recent years. Studies have also shown that students commit plagiarism for a variety of reasons, including ignorance about what constitutes plagiarism, waiting until the last minute to complete an assignment, and a desire to get good grades. Regardless of the reason, students who commit plagiarism face a variety of sanctions ranging from a “slap on the wrist” to expulsion from school. Because of the potential long‐term ramifications of committing plagiarism, it is essential that educators understand why students commit plagiarism and learn ways to teach students how to avoid it. This paper presents a workshop designed to teach students how to avoid committing it and offers a variety of ways in which this material can be incorporated into a program’s existing curriculum.     

‘Not necessarily a bad thing …’: a study of online plagiarism amongst undergraduate students

Whilst the copying, falsification and plagiarism of essays and assignments has long been a prevalent form of academic misconduct amongst undergraduate students, the increasing use of the internet in higher education has raised concern over enhanced levels of online plagiarism and new types of ‘cyber‐cheating’. Based on a self‐report study of 1222 undergraduate students, this paper explores the nature and patterning of online plagiarism amongst students in UK higher educational institutions. The data find around three‐fifths of students self‐reporting at least a moderate level of internet‐based plagiarism during the past 12 months, with significant differences in terms of gender, educational background and—most notably—subject discipline. Students’ online plagiarism was also found to correlate strongly with their self‐reported levels of offline plagiarism. The data therefore highlight the need to contextualize online plagiarism in relation to the wider ‘life‐world’ of the contemporary university student and, in particular, the role of the internet in their everyday non‐academic lives. The paper concludes by discussing how university authorities may go about addressing internet‐based plagiarism in the contemporary university setting.     

First‐year university science and engineering students’ understanding of plagiarism

This paper is a case study of first‐year science and engineering students’ understandings of plagiarism. Students were surveyed for their views on scenarios illustrating instances of plagiarism in the context of the academic work and assessment of science and engineering students. The aim was to explore their understandings of plagiarism and their judgement about the seriousness of each incident, and to shed light on the decisions they might make in response to such situations. The data indicated that although students could provide sound definitions of plagiarism, they did not always appreciate the scope of class‐based activity that constitutes plagiarism. Some examples of plagiarism were regarded as less serious than others, and in contradiction with the institution’s policy. Students also generally favoured more lenient penalties than provided for by policy. The purpose of the study was to ascertain first‐year students’ developmental needs in relation to academic honesty, plagiarism and appropriate acknowledgement of others’ work.