How prevalent are plagiarized submissions? Global survey of editors

Most analyses of plagiarism focus on published content and do not report on the prevalence of plagiarism in submitted articles. Fears over large‐scale plagiarism, particularly in articles submitted by authors for whom English is a second language, have only been investigated in small publishing communities or using duplication‐checking analysis, which does not separate legitimate from unacceptable duplication. This research surveyed journal editors from around the world to ascertain recent (past year) experiences of plagiarized and/or duplicated submissions. We then compared their experiences to their assumptions about global levels of plagiarism. The survey received 372 responses, including 119 from Asian editors, 112 from European editors, and 57 from editors in North America. The respondents estimated that c.15% of all submissions contained plagiarized or duplicated content, although their own experiences were in the range of 2–5% of submissions. Of the respondents, 42% reported no incidence of plagiarized or duplicated submissions in the past year. Asian editors experienced the highest levels of plagiarized/duplicated content, although most of the problem articles were resolved, indicating that most of the identified duplication constituted relatively minor problems, rather than fraudulent plagiarism.     

'How Does It Get into my Imagination?': Elementary school children's intertextual knowledge and gendered storylines

This article draws on a case study of children's response to stories and uses post-structuralist theory to examine how the children who participated in the study used their intertextual knowledge to understand and produce disruptive stories. 'Disruptive' refers here to texts that challenge and go beyond conventional and limiting traditional storylines about race, gender and class through presenting unexpected characterisations, plots, outcomes or details-for example, feminist fairy tales, or stories where the protagonists belong to visible minorities. This article looks specifically at stories that disrupt conventional storylines about gender, and explores ways of broadening children's intertextual knowledge and enhancing their ability to read and write critically. Examples from children's writing and conversations are analysed.     

Space matters: framing the New Zealand learning landscape

Learning Environments Research - Significant funding is devoted across the world to transforming traditional classrooms into flexible learning environments. These efforts are often...     

'No Number Can Describe How Good It Was': Assessment issues in the multimodal classroom

Within an outcomes based educational system built on the principles of redress, social justice, multilingualism and multiculturalism, issues of equity in teaching, learning and assessment are increasingly on South Africa's educational agenda. This article locates itself within debates concerning the politics of representation in mainstream classrooms, in which written standard English is the dominant mode and language through which students' meanings are read and assessed. The authors, consisting of English and Art educators, have been implementing forms of 'multimodal pedagogies' in different classrooms in Johannesburg in a move to challenge the existing narrow constraints of representation permitted in mainstream schooling. Through a case study discussion of a multimodal project with disaffected Soweto youth, the authors argue that new criteria for assessment need to be developed in order to address the complexity of thinking about communication as a multiple semiotic practice and students as designers of meaning. Such criteria place human agency and resourcefulness at the centre of meaning-making, and focus on the recruitment of resources, generativity across modes, linkages and connections across modes and genres, voicing of self, community and culture, the processes of making and reflectiveness, as well as taking account of the 'community of arbiters'.