A "web of insecurity": research on student attitudes towards referencing – Colin Neville

Follow-up to Student attitudes to plagiarism, focus groups from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

I've just come across a really useful report by Colin Neville¹ (University of Bradford, LearnHigher Project/Learner Development Unit) summarizing his research into student attitudes towards referencing and plagiarism. Colin is also the author of The Complete Guide to Referencing and Avoiding Plagiarism, Open University Press, 2007.

His research is comprehensive and qualitatively rich. His findings are entirely consistent with our much smaller study. There is in particular much of interest about the "web of insecurity" (as he has termed it) concerning referencing and plagiarism. His findings back up what we have heard about these problems getting in the way of academic writing and of students enjoying their studies:

My university stresses the point that they take plagiarism extremely seriously. Most of the students therefore tend to be scared that they will plagiarise by accident, and as result they over-reference their work to be on the safe side.  This is a shame since it interrupts the flow of many essays.  It also makes the essay look like a gathering of people’s ideas with a lack of one’s own thoughts since the references seem overwhelming (Undergraduate: European Studies). p.15

The need to reference every proposition or idea diminishes the opportunity to develop my own ideas for fear of not having properly referenced all knowledge in the assignment (Postgraduate: European and International Business Law). p.17

Colin lists ten key issues, drawn from the more open part of the survey:

1. Time management issues.
2. Concerns about plagiarism.
3. Too many referencing styles; having to manage more than one referencing style (joint honours undergrads especially).
4. Critical of the detail (and pedantic formatting) needed in a reference.
5. Difficulties with integrating own views ad knowledge into assignments.
6. Inconsistent advice, marking and feedback from tutors.
7. Difficulties with referencing particular sources.
8. Not sure when to reference, and when it is not necessary.
9. See a need for improved teaching and referencing.
10. Inconsistencies/differences between referencing guides.
    

The Learn Higher and Write Now CETLs are doing some good work. I shall have a deeper look at what they are doing.

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1. Referencing Research Report, Colin Neville, http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/Referencing/View-category.htm [Accessed 19th June 2009]

Robert O'Toole : 19 Jun 2009 11:52 |  Tags: Bibliography Inspiration Plagiarism Research Based Learning Student Attitudes |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On the value of posters, elevator pitches, short movies and other restrictive formats

Today I had a meeting with Carol Rutter and Susan Brock of the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning). I will be working in CAPITAL on the Open Space Learning project, starting in September. But today we were discussing another linked idea. We would like to set up a online video-based journal of academic and creative performance work by students and teachers. It will be a means for showcasing good work from across the whole university. It will also help us to evaluate and communicate methods for using performance in learning and teaching. For the students, it will give them the opportunity for their work to appear in a peer-reviewed online publication.

We discussed the three necessary components of the project:

1. Designing the online "container" for the journal, which needs to be easy to maintain but visually impressive.
2. Running an editorial process, with various publishing "zones", leading from simple sharing of work up to full peer reviewed publication in the journal.
3. How students can create good quality videos quickly (in one session) and without constant support.
   

Part 3 is the most difficult. But with the experience I have got from the E-Squad and Media Workshop, and the equipment that I have bought (iMacs, Sanyo Xacti cameras), I believe that I can get the video production process working efficiently.

There's a final issue that we discussed, one that I think is pedagogically very interesting. Carol has taken as her inspiration for this the Version online arts journal, created by the University of California, San Diego. It features:

short-form writing, photography, video and other media work limited to 500 words, five images or 50 seconds in length. UCSD News, March 2009

Does this signify the end of civilisation? A fatal collapse of academic standards? Soundbite academia?

Or perhaps the ultra-short format has benefits that can complement and enhance traditional formats. I've been involved in a couple of initiatives that get students to work in short formats. The Warwick Shootout Competition sees its competitors creating 7 minute creative movies over 24 hours. The results are often brilliant. The students learn the value of efficiency. To succeed they must get inside the minds of the audience and understand how to use cues, symbols and narrative structures to communicate an often complicated idea without belittling it. The genius behind the competition, my former mentor Kay Sanderson, would tell me that the most important part of the writing process is the editing - even when that means losing half of what you write.

A second interesting example is one that seems to be becoming popular in many academic departments: the poster. At Warwick we run an annual poster competition, in which PhD students present an A2 poster explaining their research to a non-specialist audience. I'm always impressed by how much conceptual sophistication they can get into that format without completely overloading it with meaningless jargon (or using 8px type). The winners often have very little text, but rather use great visual design and images. Focus really matters. Understanding and representing process and structure matters. I have been one of the judges. Each student has a short amount of time to complement their poster with a verbal presentation. The students who match a well designed, efficient poster with a confident and well thought out pitch are the ones that win. In my informal conversations with students who have entered the competition, I have discovered how the challenge of creating an efficient and effective visual design helps them to construct and deliver the verbal picth, and consequently to be more confident and coherent in understanding their own research process.

I've also been doing some work on using the writing of "elevator pitches" (80 word long statements) as a collaborative thinking exercise. Last week I taught a 2 hour session to IT professionals on "presenting yourself on the web" and used an elevator pitch activity (preceeded by some mind mapping with Mindmanager) as a way to get them to formulate and express difficult ideas efficiently and without jargon.

So, there's a good pedagogical reason for the format that we are considering for the online video journal. And an interesting example of how "design literacy" can significantly enhance learning.

Robert O'Toole : 18 Jun 2009 12:56 |  Tags: Communications Design Focussed Thinking Implementation |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Student attitudes to plagiarism, focus groups

This is a short report on an ongoing investigation into the support that we provide for students concerning plagiarism and academic integrity. We are looking into the provision of resources and activities that complement source matching software. It also presents significant information on an issue that might prevent students from being more creative, collaborative and experimental in how they learn.

15 years ago I was an undergraduate philosophy student at Warwick, doing my final examinations and writing my dissertation. I had a great time, having always enjoyed academic writing. I even enjoyed doing exams! – Yes: “weirdo”.

I did well. That was probably more to do with my enthusiasm for thinking and writing than any innate genius. But also, I felt as if I was working within a creative and free-thinking environment. Sharing ideas and supporting each other was key to that. The academics and PhD students with whom I studied made us feel as if we were contributing collectively to the advancement of thought and culture. At the time I had few worries. Plagiarism certainly was not one of them. We all knew what it was, and that it was wrong. But I don’t think that we ever thought much about it. It certainly wasn’t something to worry about.

In the last few days I have been running and reviewing focus groups to investigate the current student understanding of and attitudes towards plagiarism and its role in a wider sense of “academic integrity”. I co-led the sessions with Han-Na Cha of the Centre for Student Development and Enterprise. Han-Na is also a Warwick graduate, but somewhat younger than I. Despite having graduated more recently, I think that Han-Na was as surprised as I was when we realised just how anxious the students are about plagiarism. They are very seriously concerned about it, to the point at which it is disrupting their ability to write fluently and with enjoyment. A colleague from the Library has also encountered this when teaching key skills to students.

It has to be said that the students we talked with are not entirely representative. Han-Na is focussing upon taught masters students. They are different to undergraduates in some important ways. A masters course is shorter and more intense. The students are expected to be more independent and research-oriented. Assessment activities are often more like investigations than essays – meaning that the end product is constructed over a longer time (with more risk of mixing up notes and accidentally failing to cite sources correctly). Quite often, masters students will have successfully completed undergraduate study in one subject, and then moved to undertake a masters in a different subject. Having mastered one style of research, referencing and writing, they must quickly adapt to a different style. They are also more likely to be international (non-EU) students. Which means that they come from often very different academic cultures. This was recognized by all of the students as being a contributing factor.

However, I do suspect that the anxieties that were expressed in the sessions, and some of the root causes of those worries, are felt much more widely.

I can see some contributing trends, beyond those specific to international masters students:

• Referencing seems to be a point of stress, with many different systems being used. There may even be different variations of style enforced in assessment within the same course. Students can lose marks for getting referencing wrong. They feel that they might be accused of plagiarism if they fail to give enough citations. We heard that they might spend more time on referencing than on writing. Support with the mechanisms of referencing is needed. But perhaps more importantly, students need support to understand how to use sources to support their writing without it getting in the way of good academic writing.
• Originality, the students told us, is seen as being essential, but at the same time must be justified with demonstrable academic rigour. That’s quite a hard act to pull-off. The students don’t seem to be well equipped with the skills to combine the two. But that is a rare skill anywhere.
• Collaboration, they are told, is important. But they don’t seem to get much guidance on the line between collaboration and collusion, and how to write about collaborative work. This is a matter of intellectual property. An essential skill.
• I suspect that, with the increase in access to online journals and other electronic resources, students are expected to use a much wider range of sources. This makes note taking, referencing and writing more of a challenge. It seems that note-taking techniques and tools have not developed to cope with this.
• And finally, we have the threat of automated plagiarism detection: Turn It In. The students all know about this. If we believe that machines are infallible, but doubt our own ability to write and reference perfectly, then a system like Turn It In would make innocent law abiding citizens worried. Of course we know that it’s not that simple. It is only a “source matching” tool. But the students are un-necessarily worried.

Robert O'Toole : 17 Jun 2009 16:18 |  Tags: Plagiarism Research Based Learning Student Attitudes |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem