Avoiding Plagiarism

 

Avoiding Plagiarism
Grade Level: 3-5

Texas School Library Standards:
Strand 1- Information Literacy: School library programs offer information literacy instruction
that enables students to efficiently locate, accurately evaluate, ethically use, and clearly communicate information in various formats.
Dimension 1: Learners and educators practice the ethical and legal use of information including transformative fair use, intellectual freedom, information access, privacy, proprietary rights, and validation of information as approved in local policy EFA, federal law (1st Amendment), and best library practices (Library Bill of Rights).

Materials:
-Animal articles from Gale (or another nonfiction database) cut up into sections
-Sticky notes
-Pencils
-Whiteboard and projector OR interactive smart board

Instructional Procedures:
1. Share with students that they will learn about plagiarism today and understand what it looks like.

 
2. Show the youtube video “Explaining Plagiarism (Paraphrasing & Citing too!)” by Wendy Foreman (https://youtu.be/uAmm5YSe_us)

3. After the video, discuss with students what plagiarism is and why it is a problem.
- Include a discussion about consequences both punitive and ethical.

 
4. Explain to students reading information and making their own notes is the best way to avoid plagiarism.
- Tell students that they will be able to practice making their own notes from various nonfiction sources.
- Their notes should only be a few words to help them remember the information they read about.
- Model for students what this might look like.

5. Group students into groups of 3 or 4 and assign each group a paragraph of the preselected animal article to read and practice taking notes on.
- Your grouping needs to correspond to the number of paragraphs provided to student groups. This may require you to adjust the number of students per group.
- Remind students to write their notes using different words than those in the paragraph.
- Each student is responsible for writing their notes on their own sticky note.
- Each student is responsible for a different note on the content they read in their group’s article. No one can have the same note written on their sticky note.

6. After providing students with about 5-10 minutes to read, discuss and write their notes individually, using the whiteboard, divide it into sections. The number of sections should match the number of groups you have.

7. Divide the whiteboard into sections matching the same number of groups.
- Read aloud the article one section at a time.
- After each section ask the group to share their notes and stick them to the board in that section.

8. Once you've gone through the entire article go through the notes one section at a time and together construct one or two sentences that reflect the content covered in the student's notes.

9. Read the newly constructed piece aloud. As you are doing so, have students help you check to make sure none of the original source’s material is included verbatim.

10. Next, briefly show students how to cite the source they used to find their information for their notes and article constructed.

Suggested Instructional Strategies:
Cooperative learning
Flexible/strategic grouping
Project-based learning

Assessment:
Assessment will be students successfully learning how to take notes on a nonfiction article without plagiarising.