Student learning outcome:
Avoiding plagiarism
Students plagiarize — but their intent is rarely malicious. Plagiarism happens because students don't know how to avoid it when navigating too much information. An inability to “say it in their own words” often leads to plagiarism. We encourage you to explicitly address plagiarism in your courses, but not solely in punitive terms. Modeling paraphrasing and developing writing strategies for summarizing material offer some ways to help students avoid plagiarism and improve their writing skills simultaneously.
Fortunately, Wikipedia has standards and practices in place to delete plagiarism and close paraphrasing. Students need to ensure that their hard work won’t get removed or they could face being blocked from editing. They should handle sources very carefully by using their sandbox to keep track of where they are discovering knowledge about their topic. Utilizing an organized system of logging sources that will enable them to quickly differentiate between their own writing and that of their sources, as well as peer reviewing, can help guarantee that the content is in their own words.