Mind Bend

I’m a lucky girl. When I create content for online learning activities, the educational technology experts who work for my school system collaborate with me. Last week, I went to them with a dream. My students still struggle with reading their Turnitin.com reports; they don’t understand when a “match” constitutes plagiarism and when it’s incidental. To help them practice, I imagined creating an activity that branched. If students answer a question correctly, they would continue to a different question than if they answer incorrectly. This way, the activity can provide extra help to students who misunderstand a concept before layering on the next complex circumstance.

The experts greeted my dream with calm nods. “Yup. We can build that. Send us the content.” Oh! Okay! All systems go, right?

Since these magical people agreed to do the technical side, I started sifting through last semester’s Turnitin.com reports for screen shots showing the kinds of matches I want to help students distinguish. After I assembled half a dozen images, I started writing the first question. Question…feedback for correct answer…feedback for incorrect answer—Wait! Stop! I can branch out! Instead of writing feedback for an incorrect answer, I could write another question. In my better teaching moments, I greet student errors with follow up questions, trying to direct students towards the thought process that will yield greater comprehension. Now I could try and structure this computer activity to model that practice. (It’s not that I think the computer can replace me here, but as things currently stand with my students, I am not getting this Turnitin.com report lesson across to everybody. I decided to go down this road because I think students need to process this kind of critical reading independently to fully internalize it.)

Deciding to write a branching activity turns out to be very different than actually writing a branching activity, at least for my non-millennial brain. It hurt as much as my earlier attempts to be non linear. Flow charts and diagrams started to swim in my mind’s eye. How many branches would there be? Would the students answering follow up questions to incorrect responses ever get back to the trail blazed by students giving correct responses? Within half an hour, I felt hopelessly snarled in all the potential variables. My pedagogy bases itself on adaptability, so here I am knee deep in branching online activities when I love linear structure. Gosh, I miss the days of constructing linear activities exclusively. Sigh.

So I spent a few days feeling panicked every time I opened up my attempts at drafting this activity. Finally, I decided to write the activity from beginning to end as if a student answered every question correctly. What would the tree trunk of this branching exercise look like? What breadth am I trying to cover here? I needed to know the answers to those questions. Then, I looked at each question and imagined my follow up questions like traffic pattern clover leaves, looping out from the main trunk only to touch back again with a review loop of that concept planned for later in the sequence.

Will it work? Will it make any sense? Time will tell. I hope this kind of effort yields a differentiated learning tool that serves students well. Right now, I’ve turned the draft over to my tech wonders as I sit in a sweaty heap, exhausted by thinking outside my natural thought patterns. Do my students feel this way all the time? My goodness. No wonder they want to sleep through first period…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Should Students Fail for "a Little" Plagiarism?

I don’t have a problem enforcing grades in general. Where I struggle is when students complete the most grade-significant assignment, such as the research essay, and then I find plagiarism, copy/paste plagiarism that their Turnitin.com report has found for them. All they needed to do was fix their essay before giving it to me, but many students cry fatigue, or confusion, or time crunch. They don’t dispute the plagiarism; they dispute that plagiarizing in the research essay means they fail the assignment.

Do I fail these students? So many students don’t even turn in the research essay that it feels like a waste to fail the ones who plagiarize, too. “At least I did it!” they tell me. “I’ll fix it!” Grabbing the nearest pen, they slap on quotation marks and some parentheses as I wonder how they know which resource to place within the two half moons. Does accuracy matter to them? I get the sense that they think my insistence that their work be 100% documented is as esoteric and arbitrary as if I required Roman numerals or Latin inscriptions. It feels like absurd bourgeois academic bologna to them. “I only missed a few sources,” they’ll explain. “I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal. Look!” they say as they show me the freshly inked page, “All better!”

I’ve spent weeks trying to explain it is a big deal. I have mini-lessons, group work, book passages, and online interactive activities to help them understand the nuances of academic integrity and documentation. We discuss how they have joined the world of academia and must attentively use the words and ideas of others. We even have that snazzy software, Turnitin.com, which highlights the matches found on the Internet for them. All they need to do is check to ensure that those matches are, indeed, documented. Many students tell me candidly, “Oh, I didn’t check my report. I felt good about my essay. I didn’t know about that one part. How ‘bout I fix it for you?” The idea that I wanted them to find the plagiarism, that I’m trying to teach a man to fish here, falls flat. The cold clutch in my stomach predicts that honest documentation is the new spelling: 100% accuracy is an unrealistic goal that no rubric will require.

We are at odds, these students and I. My department and I think that plagiarizing on the research essay means a failing grade, and my students think plagiarizing means losing points. For the past two days, students have argued with me over this issue. No one argues that he or she didn’t plagiarize. My students argue that their lives are too difficult for the kind of attention I required. I’ve been told terrible stories about divorce battles, cancer treatments, and financial woe. Students have begged. They’ve cried. I’ve cried. I feel a little crazy—maybe plagiarizing isn’t such a big deal when it’s not the whole essay? Am I suppressing these students? Isn’t the fact that they tried enough? Must their work meet a standard of honesty, too? (I haven’t really read them yet, so there’s yet to be a question of quality…)

The process sickens me. I lose my perspective (and my desire to teach). Why do they turn this on me? This expectation has been made clear in the syllabus, the directions, my lessons. Why am I such a draconian person for expecting their work to be properly documented when that’s what I have been teaching them how to do and what 75% of their classmates have done? I’ve been teaching thirteen years, and I cry about this almost every semester. Reading the newspaper or watching the news, I’ll see reports about “lowered standards in our public schools,” and I’ll think, “I can’t be a part of that. Reduction of expectations in the public school is akin to systematic oppression of the poor.” Yet when I’m in the middle of this grading plight, when they beg me and explain their lives are too difficult to write with attention and integrity, to please, please, please not fail them, that they’ve never written such a big assignment before and that failing it would crush their spirits, I’m so unsure that my expectations have merit. The world feels topsy-turvy, and my nerves vibrate in my hands and neck as I worry what the right priority should be…

This semester, I’ve decided those students can write another research essay on another topic with completely new sources. I’m letting it be due after the winter holiday, which means I probably won’t be teaching them when it comes due, that I’ll have to do grade change forms in the midst of starting a new term. If they plagiarize again, even “just a little,” they get the “F.” If they do a good job meeting the requirements, including the shocking standard of academic integrity, then they earn no more than a 70 on the assignment. The tears have been wiped away. My concession is satisfactory. Am I a chump or a compassionate educator?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Educator

Educational Triage: Academic Integrity or Logic?

I have taught the research essay for over a decade; my skills at teaching the components of the essay, the elements of documentation, and the aspects of academic integrity have grown with each set of students. However, the distance between my skill set and my students’ misunderstandings about plagiarism seems to grow each year despite my gains. This week, I collected short essays in which I asked students to quote one professional reading at least three times. Before submitting their work, I asked students to use Turnitin.com; I release the report to them so they can use the tool as a safety net and make changes before submitting the final draft to me in class. A record number of students committed paraphrased plagiarism; they put parenthetical notation, acknowledging the source of ideas, without using any quotation marks to signify that they copied the writer’s language word-for-word. Turnitin.com highlighted these “matches,” and the students chose to make no changes before submitting their work to me.

More and more, students tell me they had no idea quotation marks could be used for something other than dialogue. Yup, it’s true. I’ve tried to address this misunderstanding in written directions and class lessons; sadly, this misunderstanding about quotation marks seems to co-exist in students who also struggle with reading and attendance. Sometimes I feel ludicrous. I’m pursuing the curriculum appropriate for students’ age level, but my content doesn’t meet the comprehension level of a growing proportion of students. I don’t have a quantifiable assessment, but when students don’t understand the various uses for quotation marks, I suspect a lower reading level. How much can someone read and still be unaware that quotation marks are needed for someone else’s text when it’s copied word-for-word? Especially if that student has read specific directions for the very assignment? Today’s technological students are surrounded by dialogue—texting, instant messaging, cinema and t.v.; expository reading seems easy to dodge. Rather than fail all offenders, I offer students an opportunity to correct their work for the lowest possible passing grade…it’s a teachable moment, right?

Here’s the cost: I spend so much time teaching students not to plagiarize—in all its various forms—that I spend less time on excellent logic and argument in writing. I spend so much time teaching students what not to do, that I accomplish very little on helping them express authentic discussions of their own. Sometimes I think I need to work exclusively on critical reading before moving on to critical writing. Am I putting the cart before the horse, asking them to care about intellectual property before they’ve had any of their own? I think I cared about academic integrity because I felt I had a dog in the fight; I had ideas and expressions of ideas to which I planned to put my name. My students and I spend so much time clearing up what it means to be honest, that we don’t spend a significant portion of time ensuring that students write about ideas of any consequence.

A colleague of mine attributes the growing number of students who don’t understand that the syntax, the words used to express an idea, can be “owned” to the open-source nature of Internet information. Upon Googling “plagiarism,” for example, a student might find five sites that define and explain the concept with the same exact language, and one site makes no reference or gives no credit to another. The words, in effect, seem to be the public domain—common knowledge has been extended to word-for-word expression.

I know as teachers we can spend a weekend talking about “kids today” and the problems with the Internet and plagiarism; I really, really like the Internet, and I like teaching with it. I just want students to understand about quotation marks, to value written expression as worth crediting to someone else. More and more, with each passing year, I feel old, beating my intellectual property drum before a people who find satisfaction in the facsimile without concern for its origin. What line is worth fighting for on the front of research in our brave new world? Should I surrender some of the paraphrased plagiarism energy and work harder on the logic? With fifteen weeks in a semester, I’ve got to prioritize, and when I’m in the trenches like this week, I lose my certainty as to which is more important.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Educator