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http://top.sagepub.com/content/29/2/112.2The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1207/S15328023TOP2902_06

2002 29: 112Teaching of PsychologyJoshua D. Landau, Perri B. Druen and Jennifer A. ArcuriMethods for Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism

  

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Editor’s Note of Appreciation

Because of increased departmental responsibilities, PeterJ. Giordano is stepping down as editor of the Methods &Techniques section of Teaching of Psychology. I am grateful forhis dedicated and exemplary service in this position since1999. Pete has helped raise the bar for evaluation and assess-ment criteria for the M&T section, which has helped as wehave attempted to strengthen ToP’s commitment to the

scholarship of teaching. I will miss our conversations aboutthose issues. Reviewers and authors who worked with Petewill miss his helpful assistance and good judgment. Fortu-nately, Pete will continue to serve as a reviewer for ToP.

Thanks for your good work, Pete!Randolph A. Smith

Editor

New Methods & Techniques Editor Named

Pete Giordano’s successor is Adrienne Y. Lee, who re-cently completed a term as a Consulting Editor for Teachingof Psychology. Her service in that role will be good preparationfor her new position. We enthusiastically welcome Adrienneto ToP’s editorial staff and expect that she will fill this new

position with wisdom, good judgment, helpfulness, and hardwork. Henceforth, authors should submit Methods & Tech-niques manuscripts to Adrienne Lee; Department of Psychol-ogy, 3452; New Mexico State University; PO Box 30001; LasCruces, NM 88003–8001.

METHODS & TECHNIQUES

Methods for Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism

Joshua D. LandauPerri B. DruenJennifer A. ArcuriYork College of Pennsylvania

Evidence has suggested that some forms of plagiarism might resultfrom students’ inadequate knowledge of proper citation techniques(Roig, 1997). We taught students about plagiarism identificationand proper paraphrasing skills. Undergraduates who received notreatment, feedback, plagiarism examples, or a combination offeedback and examples completed 2 versions of a plagiarism knowl-edge survey, paraphrased a literary passage, and rated their knowl-edge of plagiarism. Participants in all conditions except the controlcondition were better able to identify plagiarism. In the paraphras-ing exercise, the example conditions showed a reduction in plagia-

rism. Thus, we identify an exercise that can help students identifyand avoid plagiarism.

Academic dishonesty takes several forms including cheat-ing on an examination, citing sources improperly, and plagia-rizing previously written material. In recent years, attentionhas focused on identifying the prevalence of these activities(Davis, Grover, Becker, & McGregor, 1992; Davis &Ludvigson, 1995). Davis and colleagues found that approxi-mately 76% of their participants cheated in high school or

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Vol. 29, No. 2, 2002 113

college. Of these self-reported cheaters, approximately 80%copied from a nearby paper or used crib notes. Moreover,80% of these students cheated on more than one occasion.

Obviously, cheating on an examination is a motivated andintentional act. In contrast, other types of academic dishon-esty may arise inadvertently because students are unaware ofwhat conditions violate relevant rules. For example, Froese,Boswell, Garcia, Koehn, and Nelson (1995) found that fewerthan half of their students (48%) were aware of the propertechniques for citing a source. This finding suggests thatmany students who improperly cite a source may do so be-cause of lack of knowledge, rather than because of an inten-tional motive to commit a dishonest act. Likewise, recentempirical evidence (Roig, 1997) suggested that plagiarismcan arise inadvertently because students do not have the nec-essary knowledge to avoid it. The fact that students ask “Howmuch do I have to change the wording to avoid plagiarism?”illustrates the difficulty they have in conceptualizing plagia-rism and suggests that they may plagiarize because they fail tounderstand what constitutes an instance of plagiarism(McBurney, 1996).

Roig (1997) had participants complete a plagiarismknowledge survey (PKS) and required them to read a techni-cal passage from a professional psychology journal. Next, par-ticipants examined several rewritten versions of the passage.The rewritten passages ranged from blatant plagiarism (i.e.,only a few altered words and no citation of the original au-thors) to correct paraphrasing (i.e., there were substantialwording changes, the original authors were cited). People didnot detect these errors, which indicated that they were un-aware of the criteria for proper citations. Specifically, stu-dents may commit plagiarism because they do not know howto modify the original wording sufficiently, when to provide acitation, or when to include quotation marks.

Based on these findings, we were interested in determiningwhether we could teach students to identify plagiarism and toparaphrase a passage properly. Marsh, Landau, and Hicks(1997) reported some preliminary evidence that instructionalmanipulations can help people avoid plagiarism. In their task,groups of undergraduates brainstormed to produce solutionsto everyday problems. Participants returned 1 week later andgenerated new solutions under the admonition that the ideasnot come from the first session. Approximately 20% of these“new” solutions were from the first week. However, instruc-tions to carefully review the solutions from Week 1 drasticallyreduced the level of plagiarism. This finding indicates thatpeople can, in fact, avoid plagiarism if they are cautious. Con-sequently, we predicted that teaching people about plagiarismby providing them with examples or providing them with feed-back on a plagiarism detection exercise would increase theirability to identifyplagiarismandavoid itwhenparaphrasing.

Method

Participants and Design

Ninety-four York College undergraduates (39 men and 55women) enrolled in a freshman-level research course volun-tarily participated in this experiment as part of a classroomdemonstration. We randomly assigned participants to one of

four conditions: control, feedback only, examples only, orfeedback/examples as described subsequently.

Materials

Each participant received a booklet containing two ver-sions of the PKS (Roig, 1997), a paraphrasing exercise, and apostexperiment questionnaire. In the PKS, participants com-pare a paragraph from the psychological literature with six re-written versions to determine whether each was plagiarized.Of the six rewritten versions, four were plagiarized for a varietyof reasons(e.g.,onlyoneor twowordswerealtered,only theor-der was changed) and two were properly paraphrased. Thesesurveys used passages taken from Zenhausern (1978) andCoon (1995). For the paraphrasing exercise, participants reada brief passage from the psychological literature and attemptedto paraphrase it. The postexperiment questionnaire asked stu-dents about their knowledge of plagiarism prior to the experi-mental session, how well they understood plagiarism after thesession, how helpful they thought the session was, their confi-dence in avoiding plagiarism in the future, and how importantthey thought it was for people to understand plagiarism.

Procedure

The experimenter distributed the first PKS and instructedtheparticipants to readeachrewrittenparagraphandcompareit to the original to determine if it was plagiarized. Beneatheach paragraph were three alternatives (plagiarized, not pla-giarized,cannotdetermine)aswell asa space toexplain thean-swer. After the completion of the PKS, which tookapproximately 10 min, the experimental conditions diverged.People in the feedback only and feedback/examples condi-tions saw each passage, were informed whether the passagehad been plagiarized, and were then given a rationale for eachanswer (e.g., the passage was plagiarized because the wordswere not altered sufficiently). For the feedback conditions, aPowerPoint® presentation delivered the answers to the firstPKS. People in the examples and feedback/examples condi-tions saw a brief definition of plagiarism and three plagiarizedexamples. Specifically, a PowerPoint presentation showed ex-cerpts from a case in which one romance novelist stole severalshort passages from another writer (Hellmich, 1997; Williams,1997). The feedback and the delivery of the examples lastedapproximately 6 to 7 min each. People in the control conditiondid not receive the feedback or see the examples.

At this point, all of the participants spent 10 min complet-ing the second PKS, which consisted of a new passage. Next,participants saw the following passage:

The findings indicate that elderly people who are func-tioning at a lower level, and who need a significantamount of attention in their day-to-day living, respondpositively to baby talk messages, perhaps simply becausethis is the way their caregivers talk or possibly becausebaby talk communicates reassurance and nurturance.(Caporael, Lukaszewski, & Culbertson, 1983, p. 752)

Participants then spent 10 min rewriting the paragraph withinstructions that it should not constitute a case of plagiarism.

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Finally, each participant completed the postexperimentquestionnaire.

Results

PKS Scores

We scored the PKS using Roig’s (1997) method in whichlower scores indicate better knowledge of plagiarism tech-niques. A 2 × 2 × 2 (Feedback × Examples × Scale) mixedANOVA yielded a significant three-way interaction, F(1,90) = 4.41, p = .04, MSE = 2.17, η2 = .05. Figure 1 showsthat participants in the feedback only, examples only, andfeedback/examples conditions improved their ability to de-tect plagiarism. Only the control condition did not show thispattern.

Plagiarism Metrics

We analyzed the contents of the paraphrased passages bytabulating several dependent measures including the totalnumber of words used in the passage, total number of sen-tences, number of words from the passage that our partici-pants used, number of plagiarized two-word strings, andnumber of plagiarized three-word strings. These word stringsrepresent instances in which people took two or three wordsin a row from the Caporael et al. (1983) passage and includedthem in their paraphrased passage. In addition to these mea-sures, a rater, who was unaware of the aims of the study,judged each passage for its veridicality using a 7-point Likertscale (see Table 1) ranging from 1 (low veridicality) to 7 (highveridicality).

Separate 2 × 2 (Feedback × Examples) between-subjectsANOVAs revealed that participants in all four conditionsused approximately the same number of words and sentencesand were equally successful at maintaining the content of theoriginal message. The relevant measures of plagiarism appearin Table 1. The pattern of effects was the same for all threedependent measures. Only the main effect of examples was

statistically significant: words, F(1, 90) = 6.86, p = .01, MSE= 28.12, η2 = .07; two-word strings, F(1, 90) = 12.39, p =.01, MSE = 27.14, η2 = .12; three-word strings, F(1, 90) =11.13, p = .01, MSE = 15.27, η2 = .11. Thus, people who re-ceived the examples used fewer overlapping words and wordstrings than people who did not receive the examples. Nei-ther the feedback main effect nor the Feedback × Examplesinteraction were statistically significant for any of the de-pendent measures.

Postexperiment Questionnaire Responses

The postexperiment questionnaire consisted of six itemsthat required a response on a 7-point scale ranging from 1(low degree of confidence, importance, or help) to 7 (high degreeof confidence, importance, or help). Overall, participants be-lieved that understanding plagiarism was extremely impor-tant (M = 6.24, SD = 1.10). Moreover, as a group, theybelieved that the information that we provided them withwould be useful in their courses (M = 5.03, SD = 1.31), andthey expressed confidence that they would be able to avoidplagiarism in the future (M = 5.19, SD = 1.18). Compared tothe control condition, people in the three experimental con-ditions showed a slight tendency to believe that they had abetter understanding of plagiarism following these exercisesthan before, F(1, 90) = 2.93, p = .09, MSE = .65, η2 = .03.

Discussion

Together, these results indicate that undergraduates canlearn to detect plagiarism and avoid it. Students who re-ceived feedback about their performance on the PKS and stu-dents who studied examples of plagiarized text were betterable to detect plagiarism when completing a second PKS. Inaddition, students who saw examples of plagiarized text wereless likely to plagiarize when paraphrasing. An admonish-ment to avoid plagiarism was the least effective method forhelping students detect and reduce plagiarism.

It is interesting thatwhenthe focusof the taskwasdetectingplagiarism, the examples and the feedback had similar effects:Students were more sensitive to occurrences of plagiarism.However,whenthetaskwasparaphrasingapassage,PKSfeed-back by itself did not provide as much useful information toavoid plagiarism. One possible reason for this result is that stu-dents might have thought that the examples, which reflected areal-world experience, seemed more interesting or relevant tothe paraphrasing task. Consequently, students applied the les-

114 Teaching of Psychology

Figure 1. Mean plagiarism knowledge survey scores as a function ofcondition and test.

Table 1. Mean Number of Words and WordStrings That Overlapped With the Caporael,

Lukaszewski, and Culbertson (1983)Passage

Condition WordsTwo-Word

StringsThree-Word

Strings

Control 19.0 8.3 4.1Feedback only 21.4 8.3 4.3Examples only 17.2 4.1 1.4Feedback/examples 17.5 4.9 1.6

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sons learned from the examples (i.e., plagiarism occurs in thereal world) when creating their new paragraphs.

Adopting a proactive approach to eliminate plagiarism isimportant because students who are unclear about plagiarismmay assume that they are sufficiently knowledgeable and,consequently, may not seek greater understanding. Likewise,instructors who assume that students know how to avoid pla-giarism may miss an important opportunity to give studentsthe skills to avoid the consequences of academic dishonesty.

The implications of this study are twofold. First, placing anonspecific directive to “avoid plagiarism” on a syllabus ormaking a similarly vague statement in class is not as effective asproviding students with performance feedback or examples ofplagiarized passages. Second, it is neither difficult nor timeconsuming to effect a change in students’ ability to detect andavoid plagiarism. In one class period, students learning to writean American Psychological Association style research reportcan study examples of plagiarism, take a test on their knowl-edge of it, and receive feedback on their ability to avoid it.

Althoughthe results indicate thatourexperimentalmanip-ulations may be useful, some cautions are in order. We did nottest whether these effects would extend to assignments later inthe semester or when a grade is at stake. Despite these limita-tions,our findings suggest that instructors shouldnot feelhelp-less in preventing plagiarism. Giving examples or feedback onparaphrasing attempts can have a positive effect on students’knowledge of plagiarism and their ability to avoid it.

References

Caporael, L. R., Lukaszewski, M. P., & Culbertson, G. H. (1983).Secondary baby talk: Judgments by institutionalized elderly andtheir caregivers. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 44,746–754.

Coon, B. (1995). Introduction to psychology: Exploration and applica-tion (7th ed.). New York: West.

Davis, S. F., Grover, C. A., Becker, A. H., & McGregor, L. N.(1992). Academic dishonesty: Prevalence, determinants, tech-niques, and punishments. Teaching of Psychology, 19, 16–20.

Davis, S. F., & Ludvigson, H. W. (1995). Additional data on aca-demic dishonesty and a proposal for remediation. Teaching of Psy-chology, 22, 119–121.

Froese, A. D., Boswell, K. L., Garcia, E. D., Koehn, L. J., & Nel-son, J. M. (1995). Citing secondary sources: Can we correctwhat students do not know? Teaching of Psychology, 22,235–238.

Hellmich, N. (1997, July 30). Stolen passion: Author plagiarized herrival. USA Today, p. D1.

Marsh, R. L., Landau, J. D., & Hicks, J. L. (1997). Contributions ofinadequate source monitoring to unconscious plagiarism duringidea generation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Mem-ory, and Cognition, 23, 886–897.

McBurney, D. (1996). Cheating: Preventing and dealing with aca-demic dishonesty. APS Observer, 9, 32–35.

Roig, M. (1997). Can undergraduate students determine whethertext has been plagiarized? Psychological Record, 47, 113–122.

Williams, M. (1997, July 31). Romance scribes aghast at plagiarismin their midst. Atlanta Journal/Constitution, p. E2.

Zenhausern, R. (1978). Imagery, cerebral dominance, and style ofthinking: A unified field model. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,12, 381–384.

Notes

1. These data were presented at the annual meeting of the EasternPsychological Association, Providence, RI, April 1999.

2. We thank Miguel Roig for generously sharing his materials andClaire Klinedinst and Susan Campbell for allowing us to use theirclass time. We also thank Randolph A. Smith, Linda M. Noble,Andy Leynes, and three anonymous reviewers for their com-ments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

3. Send correspondence to Joshua D. Landau at Department of Be-havioral Sciences, York College of Pennsylvania, York, PA17405–7199; e-mail: jlandau@ycp.edu.

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