English

Simon Bheki Khoza

doi:10.15700/saje.v35n4a1152

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative critical action research of six Grade 12 high school teachers who used Turnitin as part of their assessment processes. Turnitin submissions, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, observation and reflective activities were used for data production/generation. This article concluded that although Turnitin did not help teachers to prevent all learner acts of plagiarism, it did scare the learners away from any obvious act of plagiarism. Teachers and learners became aware of technology as the ‘servant’, not the ‘master’. Grounded analysis was used to generate two themes for this study. This study tried to explore the teachers’ reflections of Turnitin used in assessing their learners’ work. Purposive sampling was used in selecting the only six Grade 12 teachers who used Turnitin at a school in Durban. This article consequently recommends the use of ‘Assessment, Educating to avoid and Turnitin’ framework in any integration of hard-ware/soft-ware (HW/SW) resources.

Highlights

Turnitin is becoming one of the most popular digital technology (DT) resources that enable teachers to prevent their learners from appropriating another author’s ideas as their own
The teachers need to formulate or identify an ideology for using Turnitin as a deterrent, in order to help learners to learn in the process
Participant 4 noted: “sometimes other learners write some documents on general knowledge and submit them to Turnitin to record 0%, and make sure that they do not submit the real projects to Turnitin, but submit the short screen report to us... .”. These findings suggest that the content/ professional reason was limited in driving the participants to use Turnitin

Summary

Introduction

Turnitin is becoming one of the most popular digital technology (DT) resources that enable teachers to prevent their learners from appropriating another author’s ideas as their own Within this context, a resource is defined as anything that facilitates/initiates learning or “any person or thing that communicates learning” (Khoza, 2012:75). Ideological-ware should drive any lesson/curriculum in education, because learning is not about technology (HW or SW resources), but is, instead, about the ideology behind the learning (ideological-ware) (Amory, 2010). This suggests that those who implement the curriculum (teachers), should first understand all IW resources that underpin their intended curriculum, before the implementation of new technologies and resources occurs. Turnitin, like any other technology, should be required by the educational goals, vision and/or content as well as identified ideologies (Amory, 2014)

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