Session Description
Student plagiarism continues to be a major concern among instructors and institutions. Fortunately, over the years several plagiarism detection tools have become available to help curb the unethical behavior of plagiarizing another’s work. Tools such as Turnitin and Grammarly have assisted students and instructors in managing potential academic misconduct by highlighting similarities between the student’s current submitted work and previously submitted work by another student. If similarity results are high, the instructor must wonder if the unethical act was intentional and if so what motivated the student’s behavior. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) developed by Ajzen (1991) “addresses the individual’s intention to perform a given behavior.” In this model, “intentions are assumed to capture the motivational factors that influence a behavior.” One such study confirmed that the application of the TPB model “predicted intentions to plagiarize as a function of one’s attitude toward plagiarism” (Camara et al., 2017). Understanding students’ attitudes along with plagiarism detection tools can help instructors determine how a student perceives what plagiarism is. One item that can put all parties on the same page is the institution’s academic integrity policy. This document should be more than simply an honor code which students sign. Institutions must be committed to establishing a culture of integrity in which “the sense of membership in a community with moral expectations tends to trump temptation” (Scott, 2015). This presentation will explore how plagiarism detection tools can assist instructors in determining a student’s intent to plagiarize and how that behavior might affect an institution’s academic integrity policies.
Presenter(s)
Session Type
20-Minute Session
Audience
Novice
A recording of this presentation is available.
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