Plagiarism

Greetings!

I hope you all had a good vacation and are ready to tackle the next half of the school year.

I am giving library and study skills lessons to the students in grades 5 – 8 and last week I talked about plagiarism. I gave a definition of plagiarism and mentioned that the word comes from the Latin word for “kidnap” which is a good way to explain this to kids.

I also talked to them about how teachers can tell if you have copied and pasted.
1. It is usually obvious.
2. Teachers suspect if there are words in the selection that students do not normally use.
3. Sources can be quickly checked.

One student mentioned that it is OK as long as you cite your sources. But I told them that this is still not OK. They DO need to cite sources, but they also need to put things in their own words. Then, I gave a little demo of how to paraphrase.

First I found a short paragraph in the internet.

“An earthquake is the shaking of the ground caused by an abrupt shift of rock along a fracture in the Earth, called a fault. Within seconds, an earthquake releases stress that has slowly accumulated within the rock, sometimes over hundreds of years.”

Then I highlighted (shown in bold below) the words and phrases that are unlikely for students to be using. Your students can most likely help you find these, too.

“An earthquake is the shaking of the ground caused by an abrupt shift of rock along a fracture in the Earth, called a fault. Within seconds, an earthquake releases stress that has slowly accumulated within the rock, sometimes over hundreds of years.”

Next, I made small changes to the paragraph.

Paraphrase (Not acceptable)

An earthquake is the shaking of the ground caused by a shift of rock along a fracture in the Earth called a fault. In seconds an earthquake lets go of stress that has slowly happened inside the rock, sometimes over hundreds of years.

The parts that are in bold lettering are the parts that are not changed and still copied and plagiarized. The students can see immediately that not much has changed and understand that the paragraph is still not in their own words.

I then showed them how to take simple notes on the paragraph.

Notes:
Earthquake – shaking of the ground
Causes – sudden movements of the rock, fault line moves,
Stress builds up in the rocks over long periods of time

Finally I showed them a paragraph rewritten in my own words and an acceptable paraphrase.

Paraphrase (Acceptable)

When the ground suddenly starts shaking, you know an earthquake is happening. This is caused by the sudden movements of the rocks near a fault line. Over long periods of time stress builds up in the rocks and when they move, the ground shakes.

If I were doing this in a classroom setting rather than a 15 minute library lesson period, I would have the students help with each part, and I would also do this with a few paragraphs until I felt that the students had the idea.

Please feel free to use my sample in your lessons if you would like to. I believe that it is important to teach this in elementary school. Somehow I never got this lesson. Teachers would tell us to put it in our own words, but I really didn’t understand until much later.

Have a great week.
Audrey