Preventing Plagiarism with Integrated Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge

This study investigates the claim that the over-emphasis on avoiding plagiarism during the writing process is detrimental to learning, and potentially exacerbates the concealment of copying third-party content. This article discusses the role third-party content plays in learning genre-specific writing styles and controversies behind adopting this view, and how the over-emphasis on rules and procedures are particularly detrimental to learning language and ethical writing skills. This action-research approach was developed over two years with three groups of college students (N=155). While every group was given access to similar technology, the pedagogical approach and content were modified each term. The effects on word-count, writing accuracy, originality, and similarity were compared. The results indicate that: originality and writing content improved with direct feedback and introducing technology at the moment of need; teaching rules and procedures, and providing written corrective feedback had negligible impact on content, originality, the use of citations, or self-correction of language features; consultation, immediate corrective-feedback, verification, and formative-feedback improved originality and writing quality; and poor attendance and participation were the greatest impediments to overall performance. Implications of these results are examined.