Active Learning Activities for Teaching Academic Integrity

Today, someone on the information literacy and instruction listserv asked about some fresh ways to teach or emphasize academic integrity.  Yes, this is a plagiarism discussion.  How can you engage students?  Many instructors dread this topic; typically, it does not generate a lot of excitement in the classroom.  Sometimes students feel accused from the outset in a discussion like this.  Below is a response I shared with the person who asked me:

Admittedly, this might not be innovative or fresh, but I have attached a PowerPoint presentation we show to students.  Each slide asks a question, so when one appears on the slide students are invited to write down their own answer.  Then they are asked to share that answer with a neighbor before talking with the whole class as a group.  This makes it so that the students participate a bit more than when the instructor shows the slide and asks for volunteers to answer.  Freshmen generally speaking do not pipe up to answer, but this may be different in the upper-division courses.

Here's an Academic Integrity Tutorial you may consider using.  If you found some stories or examples of plagiarism, then perhaps you could split the class into groups with some general questions:

1. How does this story relate to academic integrity issues?
2. What can we learn from this?
3. What could they have done differently?
4. What did they do correctly?
5. Are there any "gray" areas within the story?  How would your group reconcile these "gray" areas?
   
6. What impact does plagiarism or academic dishonesty have on society?  Does your example or story illustrate your point?  How?

After a specified amount of time (maybe 10 minutes), groups could be brought back to tell the rest of the class what was discussed.  Dividing the labor sometimes increases the participation of the group members, so having a spokesperson, a scribe to take notes for the spokesperson, a time keeper to make sure the group stays on task in the allotted time frame, and maybe even a naysayer to play the devil's advocate and/or an agreer to emphasize the best points presented.

In my Delicious.com bookmark account, there are 60 websites tagged with the word plagiarism.  There ought to be a good number of anecdotes, news articles, and websites devoted to plagiarism or academic integrity.

Do you like the questions listed above?  What kinds of questions would you ask?  Would this kind of an activity invite participation?  Could this fly with undergraduate and/or graduate students? 

Activity for Narrowing Down a Topic

Today I participated in a good class discussion about academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and narrowing topics down to a manageable size. I split the class in half, and had one set of groups talk about childhood obesity and how it could be broken down into a smaller topic for a 5-6 page paper. The other half of the class talked about "reality TV," and how it is influencing society. They were a great class to work with.

The whole activity took about ten minutes. In groups of 3-5 they discussed various aspects of the topic to consider how it could be narrowed down from a large, book-sized topic to a more workable essay-sized topic. After five minutes, a scribe wrote down answers from the groups on the board, and I inserted comments and suggested ideas. The scribe divided the board in half and wrote the ideas for obesity on one side and for reality tv on the other.

Then I suggested in general terms, that they can always narrow down a topic by population (a demographic), location (geography), and by time period.

Here are some of the results from the group discussions about narrowing a topic:

Childhood obesity

* parenting
* video games/TV (sedentary lifestyles)
* genetics (it's changing)
* future health
* junk food access/availability

"Reality" TV

* perception of reality
* distracts from life
* jackasses (society getting dumber?) Reminds me of Pinocchio movie where the boys play and do bad things, then they become jackasses.
* demographic influence

Narrowing Down a Topic (suggestions from the librarian)

* demographic = population i.e. age group, race, class, single-parent family, income, etc.
* time = last 5 years, last 10 years, the 90s, 19th century, etc.
* location = city, state, region, country, world--even urban, rural, 3rd world, etc.

For the plagiarism discussion, I used a PowerPoint presentation to drive the discussion. Each slide asked a question:

• What is academic dishonesty?
• What is plagiarism?
• What is common knowledge?
• How can you avoid plagiarism and academic dishonesty?
• Where can you go for help?

With each question, students wrote down answers on their own piece of paper. Then they discussed their answers with a neighbor before we talked about each question as a class. This method of active learning seems to yield more participation. It leads me to believe that students will more readily accept what they hear from a peer than from their instructor. Also, students like to test their ideas on each other before sharing them with the instructor and the class as a whole.

First-Year Seminar: Plagiarism Discussion

Yesterday I taught the First-Year Seminar [FYS] students for the first time. One of my colleagues actually co-teaches this class with another faculty member on campus. Well, I felt pretty nervous, and it did not help that my throat kept going super dry. Basically, we have an outline that library instructors can choose to follow for each of the two sessions we have with a FYS class. In the first part we discuss academic honesty and academic dishonesty, focusing on avoiding plagiarism. Someone had already created a PowerPoint presentation to help lead a discussion on the topic. Most of the slides pop up with a question, and then the librarian lets the students answer that question. I had heard that many of the students do not participate, which should not be too surprising. With that in mind I wanted to find a method or technique that would elicit more responses. I remembered something from working in the Center for Teaching at the University of Iowa--the pair and share technique. This means students work in twos or threes to discuss the question, then they share with the rest of the class. I decided to have students write down their answers first, then pair, then share. I thought it worked rather well.

The class began at noon, yet students were mostly full of energy. This class talked a lot among themselves [not always about the topic at hand], but they did well in participating along the way. One student seemed rather confrontational in the sense that he challenged me on a couple of occasions. He accused me of plagiarizing the PowerPoint presentation, which did catch me off-guard. Fortunately, my colleague spoke up and said it was not plagiarizing and invited me to tell him why. I said that the presentation had been created by another library employee, and that I represented the library in using it. Another student also spoke up by saying that I never claimed I had created it. She mentioned that one of the slides had said someone else had created it, although when I looked at the PPt presentation again I did not see that anywhere. The confrontational student was not mean-spirited, just full of energy and wanting to impress (I assume) his classmates. It seems that some students feel they know it already and feel put-out to attend something so basic as a discussion on plagiarism. Truly, many students probably do know about plagiarism and academic honesty, but I believe they can still learn something if they listen and desire to learn something.

After bringing back the class from a group discussion, I let one of the students answer. She spoke softly, and the "confrontational" student kept on talking. I let the student finish her thought and waited for the "confrontational" student to stop talking. When I had his attention I politely [and shakily as I was nervous. I hope I was not rude or demeaning.] said "I believe your classmates would appreciate it if you would listen to them while they are talking." He piped down, and the rest of the class period he listened attentively to the comments of others. He was one of the brightest in the classroom if you ask me. He also offered an answer to the question: "What is academic dishonesty?" He chimed in that skipping class could be a form of academic dishonesty to which I added, "yes, if you want to gain an education and you skip class then you are being dishonest with yourself." My colleague later asked who had given this answer and told him that he would give him credit for that answer.

I don't think that the student held a grudge against me. If anything, I think he gained some respect from me. Perhaps that is wishful thinking, but his countenance/appearance did not suggest he had any negative feelings for me. It can me scary to play the part of the teacher in stepping up and asking for some order in a classroom, especially if you are a new instructor. True, I have had many teaching experiences in the past, but I do not know if I asserted myself in similar ways in the past. I hope this experience remains a positive one in my mind and that I assert myself in positive ways in the future classes I teach.