Conceptualising plagiarism: using Lego to construct students' understanding of authorship and citation

The transition from further to higher education is marked by a series of challenges for the new student, not least the requirement to learn the discourse of academic practice, and referencing as a part of that. By perceiving what it means to reference, students should also come to understand what it means to write, including the problematic areas of authorship and ownership of ideas. Academic writing and paraphrasing are demanding concepts that require the student writer to enter into the academic discourse and relinquish their hold on the worlds of a text and embrace instead the argument behind them, in a form of ‘language-game’. Taking an interpretative, dialogic approach to referencing, the inherent playfulness of learning is emphasised through the use of Lego, used as a metaphor for the students' construction of meaning and to exemplify the discipline of citation and attribution. This paper outlines a method that metaphorically and literally enables students to construct and make visible the underlying theoretical philosophy of referencing and plagiarism by using Lego as a mode of authorship, in the context of the nature of academic discourse and what it means to write. In addition, the personal, engaging nature of the activity meant that it would be a more memorable activity too.     

高校数学专业学生作业抄袭原因及对策分析

学好数学离不开一定数量的数学作业。通过做作业,学生既可以巩固书中的定义、定理、公式等内容,又可以锻炼运用知识解决问题的能力,教师则可以及时了解学生对知识的掌握情况。然而学生们大量的抄袭行为使得作业失去了原来的功用。本文将分析影响高校数学专业学生作业大量抄袭的原因并结合自己的教学经验提出一些对策,以供其他数学教师借鉴。     

从《佩文韵府》、《骈字类编》、《子史精华》看康雍之际的类书编纂

选取诸书中与“月”相关的事类,通过多角度对比,总结《骈字类编》与《佩文韵府》、《骈字类编》与《子史精华》材料之间的相互关系,证明这几部类书在材料的运用上是各自独立的,很大程度上避免了辗转稗贩这一历代类书编纂中的痼疾。     

Local plagiarisms

Plagiarism and collusion are significant issues for most lecturers whatever their discipline, and to universities and the higher education sector. Universities respond to these issues by developing institutional definitions of plagiarism, which are intended to apply to all instances of plagiarism and collusion. This article first suggests that plagiarism and collusion are related instances of the desirable phenomenon of intertextuality, but which are defined as transgressive, that is, intertextuality that crosses a boundary defining relationships that are inappropriate in a specific context. The article then goes on to show, through interviews with lecturers in a variety of disciplines, that lecturers’ interpretations of inappropriate or transgressive intertextuality vary for reasons including the expectations and practices of the discipline. The article suggests that transgressive intertextuality needs to be defined according to the disciplinary expectations and that a single institutional definition may be inadequate to defining varying disciplinary perspectives.     

Student plagiarism in higher education in Vietnam: an empirical study

This paper assesses and compares the prevalence of plagiarism across different student and assignment characteristics at a university in Vietnam, using the similarity index reported by the text-matching software Turnitin as a proxy measure of plagiarism on a sample of 681 student papers. The findings present a level of match higher than reported in earlier studies at universities outside of Vietnam, with an average similarity index of 29.06%. Controlling for the gender and major of the students, the extent of plagiarism is implied to be negatively correlated with the students’ academic performances and with the likelihood of being caught, and positively correlated with the length of the assignments. Thus, this study, relying on actual text-matching data rather than self-reported surveys, provides the first empirical test of two theoretical plagiarism models proposed in the literature. The explanatory factors confirmed by this study illustrate the potential benefits of the use of software tools to detect plagiarism and can help refine academic integrity policy formulations for universities.     

图片中学术不端的类型与防范措施

学术不端行为屡见不鲜。近10年来文本查重工具的出现对学术出版中文字剽窃或重复相似度的检测比对已见成效,但图表中剽窃、篡改及伪造等不端行为却不易察觉和检测。本文主要针对学术出版中各种与图片相关的学术不端案例,进行了系统分析、归类与定义;梳理收集了目前国际上对图片造假、重复和剽窃的鉴别方法、检测工具及效果评估;提出了正确分析图片原创性的一些建议与方法,力求与国内同行共同探讨防止图片中的学术不端行为的标准与规范,确保学术出版回归原创,保护版权。     

Australian TESOL Teachers’ Cultural Perceptions of Students

Over the last decade, research in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) has increasingly focused on the relationship between culture and learning. Researchers such as Kumaravadivelu (2003) have been vocal in their opposition to the practice of cultural stereotyping. In the current study, Holliday’s (2005) model of Culturism was used as a theoretical basis. Six Australian TESOL teachers were interviewed to determine the nature and extent of the cultural stereotypes that they held, particularly as they pertained to specific learning-related behaviours. A qualitative analysis of the data revealed that teachers most often grouped students in terms of national or regional cultures and believed that cultural background strongly influenced student learning behaviour, resulting in the formation of a number of stereotypes. Despite this, the findings also demonstrated that teachers were self-aware of the pitfalls of cultural stereotyping and took other factors influencing student behaviour into consideration.     

Back translation: an emerging sophisticated cyber strategy to subvert advances in ‘digital age’ plagiarism detection and prevention

Advances have been made in detecting and deterring the student plagiarism that has accompanied the uptake and development of the internet. Many authors from the late 1990s onwards grappled with plagiarism in the digital age, presenting articles that were provoking and established the foundation for strategies to address cyber plagiarism, including software such as Turnitin^TM. In the spirit of its predecessors, this article presents a new, less-detectable method of cyber-facilitated plagiarism known as ‘back translation’, where students are running text through language translation software to disguise the original source. This paper discusses how this plagiarism strategy attempts to subvert academic attempts to detect plagiarism and maintain academic integrity in the digital age, before presenting useful detection tools and then critiquing three classroom plagiarism management approaches for their usefulness in the current digital and educational context.     

The Anatomy of a Plagiarism Initiative: One Library's Campus Collaboration

ABSTRACT

Plagiarism in media and print continues to be a major issue for professors, librarians, and students. Through initiatives and outreach from the B. Davis Memorial Library at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, plagiarism Web sites have been created and workshops and programs continually provided for faculty and students to detect, discourage, and prevent plagiarism. Faculty members are presented with techniques and tips that range from designing assignments to detecting and ultimately stemming the tide of plagiarism, and students are apprised of plagiarism and the myriad ways of avoiding it. However, collaborations between librarians and the academic community are vital in arresting and curtailing this pervasive problem.