Teaching Plagiarism

With resources so easily available, it is important to explain plagiarism at a very early age.  Even kindergarten students can begin to understand it in simple terms.  A week ago I was in an art classroom where the third grade students were beginning a new project using lines to design a robot.  To kick off the project, the book Robot Zot (a great little story!) was read to the students.  Before the students could begin, they had to fill out a sheet giving some details about how they would complete the design and provide a name for the robot.  As I walked around the room, I noticed quite a few students who either chose the name of the robot from the book or picked the name of a popular robot from films.  We stopped class for a few minutes and talked about why this was unacceptable.  We talked about how using the name someone else came up with was a form of stealing. 

 Having these types of conversations early and often, I think, are important to help students understand plagiarism.  Plagiarism is such a big word and most young students need repeated exposure to the word with plenty of examples in order to understand the concept. 

Learning to cite is a constantly evolving skill.  I felt confident citing works in print but have had to learn new methods when citing online and multimedia sources.  To complicate the matter are the different types of formats.  Do we teach the students MLA format?  APA?  During my undergraduate program MLA was the primary method taught and expected.   The first paper I wrote where the instructor required APA format was daunting and took much longer as I had to learn how to cite with a different method. 

For students in younger grades, I think it is more important the students recognize the need to give credit for resources they have found than to worry about formatting the citation correctly.  Teachers can model giving credit when showing examples of projects, by listing citations on worksheets given to the students, and by explaining what the citations mean.  Sometimes it is just a matter of capitalizing on those teachable moments, such as we did when naming our robots for an art project.  If you are looking for more information, Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything has some great additional resources for teaching about intellectual property.