New Plagiarism April 19, 2008

More and more classrooms are requiring students to answer textbook questions to learn the content. Sometimes we have to teach with the textbook, but having students answer specific questions about what they read could be wasteful. When I was in school, we would answer questions from a textbook. The teacher would give us the questions and we would read to find the answers. I was always told to copy what is says in the book and I think many teachers expect students to use the exact words from a book. Teachers are not using enough open ended questions and requiring students to summarize in their own words. So when students are doing research papers they think it is ok to copy someone else’s words because it is what they do in class. Learning to summarize and write about what you read in your own words is less and less common in schools. Everything you read has a bias from the author and we should teach students that textbooks are not the end all be all. Textbooks are usually written in a language not suitable for all readers, so having the students answer “textbook” questions is just a bad idea all around. Teachers should ask higher order thinking questions that does not require looking up questions in the book. If you want students to not plagiarize, you need to set the example.