Abstract
Best practices research on plagiarism in the University classroom shows that modifying assignments and classroom environment can have a positive effect on lowering a student’s desire to cheat. James Lang suggests four features of a learning environment that can be fostered to ameliorate a student’s desire to cheat: mastery of the material for its own sake, low-stakes assignments, intrinsic motivations for learning and, a high expectation of success. Scaffolding has been shown to be a useful pedagogical technique for empowering students (fostering a high expectation of success) My past experience using a variety of visual classroom exercises (cartooning, mind-mapping, advertising campaigns, etc.) gave anecdotal evidence that artistic and visual assignments encouraged a level of engagement and collaboration across language and cultural boundaries not experienced in other types of assignments. I hypothesized that this level of engagement and collaboration could be used with scaffolding to motivate Lang’s four features and experimented with the use of poster presentations and other visual and spatial assignments in a second year undergraduate Religious Studies course on Death. Very preliminary qualitative data support the hypothesis that, by addressing Lang’s four features and incorporating scaffolding and visual assignments into the course, students are cheating less and learning more. This research strengthens the extant literature on the impact class environment and expectations have on plagiarism while also adding to the growing body of literature supporting the use of visual assignments, such as poster presentations, mind mapping, and storyboards in the Arts and Humanities.
Highlights
I reached the sanctity of my office, closed the door, sank into a chair, and made myself just breathe deeply and calmly for five minutes
Did the students feel that plagiarism was less likely when presenting one’s research in the form of a poster, rather than a research paper
Could the development of Lang’s features be extrapolated from student perceptions of the overall Project? Was plagiarism reduced? General reflections from the implementation of the Death Fair Projects reveal that plagiarism was reduced both in the annotated bibliography and in the final presentation—the two components that would be most likely to contain plagiarized materials
Summary
I reached the sanctity of my office, closed the door, sank into a chair, and made myself just breathe deeply and calmly for five minutes. I had just sat through an excruciating 45 minutes of student panel/presentations for my second-year Religious Studies course on Death and was struggling to exorcise the echo of five almost-identical papers delivered in five different monotones to what apparently had been a classroom of crickets masquerading as people. Even more distressing than student delivery and response were the papers themselves. Even worse in my estimation, the number of papers that appeared to have been purchased were on the rise. It was that tracking down plagiarism and plagiarizers was tedious and time-consuming but, I suspected that the increase was a reflection of classroom environment and course design.
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