Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism

through Appreciative Pedagogy1

Ethelbert P. Dapiton, Ph D
ermingild@yahoo.com
Our Lady of Fatima University
Valenzuela City, Philippines

Gunning Fog Index: 17.5

Flesch Reading Ease: 33.7 Plagiarism: 0

ABSTRACT
The pressing issue of plagiarism in academia pervaded the very fiber of ethical
behavior among students. Plagiarism detection software may only go as far as
detecting strings of words that were copied from the Net; nevertheless, the problem
still remains apparent due to lack of students’ affective ability to comprehend the
consequences of plagiarism and its underlying ethical misdemeanor. Appreciative
pedagogy was introduced in this context to permeate among students’ mindset the
importance of directing the teaching-learning process into a track of profound
collective thought to create a positive image of an ideal pedagogical mechanism
impressing among students what is right and appropriate. Appreciative pedagogy is a
creative method to solve the problem of plagiarism that touches the foundation of the
issue rather than merely treating the problem at its tip. It is expected that through
appreciative pedagogy of elucidating plagiarism and its consequences, students will
have a better output away from the usual copy-paste behavior. The recent
development of plagiarism detection software is a good initiative to distinguish copied
works from the original, however, it would only gone that far enough. Without
affecting the value system of the students about the consequences of plagiarism the
issue will never stop.

Keywords: plagiarism, appreciative pedagogy, idea stealing, creative methodology,

plagiarism detection

INTRODUCTION

Plagiarism has become a commonplace in academic works and the issue

extends beyond the walls of academia pervading the halls of industry and government
institutions. It is customary for students’ course works to be often plagued with
plagiarized thoughts and ideas although professors are not spared from this
phenomenon. Several reasons prevail why students resorted to copying other people’s
work without proper attribution. The compliance sake reason as well as the
inadequacy of values regarding the act of committing plagiarism is among the most to
have been prevalent in the plethora of students’ defenses when called or caught by
Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
their professors about their plagiarized works. It is noticeable also that fear based
pedagogical method of instilling the value of avoiding plagiarism on students’ work
have fall short to prevent its occurrence. In the midst of professors’ reprimand,
demerit punishment and to the extent of giving failing marks on course works have
proved to be futile in preventing students in committing the academic crime. In some
universities, the threat of exclusion has been implemented to wary off the prevalence
of plagiarism and academic misconduct among students (O’Donnell, 2011).

Plagiarism Defined

The Oxford English Dictionary (2012) defines plagiarism as “the act of taking
the work or idea of someone else and pass it off as one’s own” while the American
Heritage Dictionary (2005) defines it as “literary thief” and the act occurs when a
writer duplicates another writer’s language or ideas and then calls the work his or her
own.

Etymology. Plagiarism was taken from the Latin word ‘plagiare’ which means to
kidnap or abduct. The word begun to enter the English language usage sometime in
1621 (Bennet, Coleman & Co, 2012) as ‘plagiary’ (now obsolete) meaning ‘kidnapper or
plunderer’, however, the sense of ‘literary thief’ was taken from the epigram of the
Roman poet Martial (Epigrammata, Liber1.52.9; 40 AD – ca. 104 AD) and was
considered to be the first treatment of ‘idea stealing’ among literary scholars.

Types of Plagiarism. Agreement among researchers that cross the threshold of

the subject stipulates the following categories:
1. Intentional Plagiarism pertains to the deliberate act of copying or claiming
others pre-written works as one’s own. It extends to taking materials from
the Net or other electronic databases without proper citation or
attribution. It goes further to the sense of mixing several works without
proper citation to those individual ideas or even quoting only a part of the
quote and leaving the rest as if its his/her own (Pardeshi et al., 2012 ;
Cheema et al., 2011; Stowers and Hummel, 2011).

2. Unintentional Plagiarism pertains to the act of accidental copying of other

people’s work. This happens when a researcher may change some few
words without changing the structure of the original sentence. Common
acts are in the form of improper citation of a source, changing the position
of quotation marks, paraphrasing without giving citation to the source and
failure to differentiate the primary and secondary sources of information
(Pardeshi et al., 2012 ; Cheema et al., 2011; Stowers and Hummel, 2011).

Difference of Plagiarism and Paraphrasing

Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
 Plagiarism occurs when a writer uses another person’s work without giving
proper quote or attribution and as well as the non-inclusion of the source in the
reference or bibliographical list at the end of the manuscript (Pardeshi et al., 2012). In
contrast, paraphrasing is rehashing somebody’s work in your own words. Pardeshi and
colleagues further exemplify that quotation marks should be used to indicate the
exact words of another author should a writer uses the same word and grammatical
structure of the original source.

Appreciative Pedagogy

Appreciative pedagogy (AP) is a derivative taken from appreciative inquiry (AI)

whose main purpose is to perform the erudition that has been put forward by
appreciative inquiry (Yballe and O’Connor, 2000) in the macro-organizational sphere
enabling basic beliefs, values and social inquiry process geared towards the generation
of positive images of anticipated realities (Salopek, 2006; Cooperrider, 1990).
Cooperrider further emphasized that positive images about ideals and visions have a
‘heliotropic effect’, meaning they give energy and directs human behavior towards
realization of the anticipated ideals. Thus appreciative pedagogy can be considered as
directing the teaching-learning process into a track of profound collective thought to
create a positive image of an ideal pedagogical mechanism impressing among students
what is right and appropriate.

Framework, Methods and Objective of the Study

At the end of every semester students are normally flooded with numerous
activities and course work requirements such as term papers. Term papers may vary in
the number of pages depending on professors’ requirement. Due to the urgency and
the need to comply, students often resorted to download several materials from the
Net mixing it their little own contribution and pass it to their respective professors.
The result is a plagiarized work at its finest. It is the intention of this research to rectify
this kind of students’ behavior towards plagiarism and academic dishonesty through
appreciative pedagogy. The author had required his students to construct a term
paper by selecting a single topic from varied pressing issues of socio-economic
problems. The term paper was required to be composed of not less than ten (10
pages) but not more than 15 pages including references. The author then gives prior
instruction and lecture about plagiarism and its consequence to student’s merit. It is
then expected that through appreciative pedagogy of elucidating plagiarism and its
consequences, students will have a better output away from the usual copy-paste
behavior.
Student reports were then analyzed for familiar strings of ideas or thoughts
that are normally not their usual choice of words if it carries inappropriate attribution
or non-attribution at all to the source. The reports were analyzed without the aid of
plagiarism detection software. Unlike the strict method of plagiarism detection
Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
software were word reordering, word substitution, word addition or deletion (Pera
and Ng, 2011) is already a ground for plagiarism for those works not attributed to
source, the author gives liberty to the students to expound their ideas in good faith
based on inner-directed deep reflection process to manifest fluidity of thoughts and
ideas which can be a substantial part of their course work content.

The author has also considered some caveats in the students’ reflection
process while they are generating their ideas on the context of contemporary views of
plagiarism based on ‘interanimating’, which pertains to how people utter or write
words that were first spoken or written by others (Blum, 2009) due to the quickness of
the mind to grasp the idea. In fact, the author also emphasize that deep contemplation
and the natural occurrence of collective human consciousness will lead two or more
persons independent from each other even separated by distance to invoke similar
strings of related words and thoughts. Ancient authors had prepared their works about
equally being an author and compiler, since they have extracted substantial contents
from the works of the best writers and most philosophic or eloquent thinkers before
them. To these people, perhaps they would have deemed that it’s been better and
more acceptable if they had extracted more and written less. They claim little of the
merit of authorship, and did not cared to distinguish their own from that which they
have taken from other sources, being quite willing that every portion of their works, in
turn, may be regarded as borrowed from some old and better writers.

Results and Discussions

Students were asked to submit a term paper zeroing in on a selected socio-

economic problem within a required number of pages. The time frame given to
accomplish such report was three weeks. In order for the appreciative inquiry method
to have bear results on student avoidance behavior in plagiarism, outputs from 80
students were proofread to detect the following patterns of plagiarism act and their
corresponding causes, to wit:

Table 1: Plagiarism act and its causes

Plagiarized Act Causes & Reasons

• Rogue submission with inappropriate • Hurriedly done to bet the deadline; most
citation method. ideas were taken and downloaded from the
Net without due observance of proper
referencing.
• Strings of ideas or thoughts that are not the • Poor disguise and pretentious
normal choice of words of the student were manifestation of knowledge without
not attributed properly to the source. acknowledgement to the source.
• Non-exhaustive review of related • Limited availability of quality reference
literatures; single source referencing for materials; limited knowledge of proper
mixed ideas. attribution to the particular source when

Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
 synthesizing different thoughts and ideas.

The appreciative pedagogy method was effective to at least 75% of the

students’ output in terms of avoidance behavior in plagiarism. The remaining 25%
plagiarized works has this to say:
Rouge submission is the most common to occur with its corresponding reason
presented in Table 1. Students opined that rogue submission occurs due to limited
amount of time to attend to different school assignments and other academic
activities thus allowing only few quality moments to sit down and work on a quality
research output. Heather (2010) posited that ‘obscure languages’ in course works as
well as apparent amounts of nonsense texts occur because of rogue submission. Rogue
submission is also attributed to the sheer amount of writing assignments (Stowers and
Hummel, 2011) given to students at the end of the semester which leads them to copy
works of other people in order to elucidate their concepts without so much difficulty
on their part.

Either intentional or unintentional, students fall prey to the lure of plagiarism

when presenting strings of ideas or thoughts without proper attribution to the original
source. Poor disguise also noticed by Cheema and colleagues (2011) or pretentious
manifestation of knowledge and owning it as if you are the first put it forward in a
scholarly manner are the second common offense found in the outputs of the students
in this context. Mahmood et al. (2010) also noticed on their findings that copy pasting,
summarizing without any source or borrowing ideas are likely to occur among
students’ behavior when doing research.

Due to limited availability of journals and scholarly materials (Pardeshi et al.,

2012) and the lack of students’ knowledge on the importance of review of related
literatures from recent scholarly works, plagiarism happens. The digital age seems to
confuse the students on the real meaning of plagiarism. Mixing and remixing has been
a commonplace also in the outputs of students that leads to unifying diverse, distinct
and varied ideas into a single thought. Students have been blinded with readily
available materials from the Net and their lack of knowledge about the standards of
authorship and attribution leads them to commit patch writing and plagiarism (Anson,
2011).

Professors have to do their share of responsibility. Oftentimes, some research

professors do teach their students to categorize their literature reviews on foreign
literatures and studies apart from local literatures and studies which have already
become an obsolete way of reviewing the literatures. The most convenient and most
logical is to review the literature in a thematic manner in line with the orientation of
the selected study. In the fast paced and interconnected modern world, research has
played an important role in the updates of modern technologies as well as the
development of knowledge. Books may provide coherent body of knowledge to the
Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
subject of study (Martin, 1985); however, the most up-to-date information of scholarly
sense can be found on journals.
Professors should walk the talk (Probett, 2011). Being models of academic
scholarship, educators must also ensure to themselves that they practice what they
teach.

CONCLUSIONS

The result of appreciative pedagogy in building students’ avoidance behavior in

plagiarism has been effective and has made a dent to the 2/3 of the outputs generated
by the students. Based on the observations made, the following manifestations of
appreciative pedagogy took place to prevent students to commit plagiarism in their
course works:

Table 2: Appreciative pedagogy method results in avoiding plagiarism

• Course work topics where anchored and lifted from personal

choices and convictions about certain socio-economic issues
based on appreciative pedagogy method
• Course work concepts were taken and was rooted in deep
observation and contemplation about certain socio-economic
issues through appreciative pedagogy method
• Students were able to generate their ideas from several
literatures with proper attribution to the source
• Collusion and copying among students in constructing and
generating their concepts and ideas were kept at minimum
• Independent exposition of ideas was highly manifested and
observable on student outputs through the use of appreciative
pedagogy method

Appreciative pedagogy has been helpful in minimizing the incidence of

plagiarism in this context. Students were able to manifest an ethical behavior that
prevented them in committing intentional plagiarism. The deep reflection process of
appreciative pedagogy to let the students mirror the real world’s socio economic
problems before they commence to write their term papers has been substantially
effective. As what Conklin (2009) in his own reflection has observed, it provided an
opportunity for students to be active participants in the process of the course and
their lives, not just the task requirements of a class. This helped illuminate the dual
nature of work as both task and process.

Similar findings were also experienced by Nealy (2011), indicating students’

interest to limit the occurrence of plagiarism.

Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
 Appreciative pedagogy is a creative method to solve the problem of plagiarism
that touches the foundation of the issue rather than merely treating the problem at its
tip. The root cause of plagiarism is the students’ inability to reckon the academic ethics
of proper attribution of ideas to the source due to several reasons ranging from lack of
language and writing proficiency to intentional stealing of ideas (Roig, 2010) but the
remediation of the problem must be treated with prevention rather than punishment
as suggested by Dyrud (2011). Hansen et al. (2011) also agreed that development of
innovative assignments will eliminate the incidence of plagiarism.

The recent development of plagiarism detection software is a good initiative to

distinguish copied works from the original, however, it would only gone that far
enough. Without affecting the value system of the students about the consequences
of plagiarism the issue will never stop.

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Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.
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Cite as: Dapiton, E. P. (2012). Building Students’ Avoidance Behavior in Plagiarism Through Appreciative
Pedagogy. IAMURE International Journal of Social Sciences, vol 4 (Oct 2012), 81-91.