Google Scholar

I often struggle with students and either their inability to reference sources of information or lack of recognition that it is wrong. Cutting and pasting from the Internet is a common practice. One component of the Job Corps academic program is the writing of an essay about a topic within their vocational trade curriculum. Many of my students initially want to write about forklift operator safety. Unfortunately, I would guess that eighty percent still fail to cite references even when I discuss the reason for doing so.

Fellow graduate students recommended Google Scholar as a means to combat plagiarism. I accessed the site and copied a sentence from an article by Jane Howland appearing in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. The source of the sentence was found immediately.

I don't think students have the frustration today that I had in college or even high school when conducting research for term papers. First, I would need to find potential resources in the card catalog or periodical index. I would then have to find them in the library "stacks." If I was lucky enough to find the journals of a year published combined into a "book" then I would hope that the issue or page I was looking for had not been removed. Many times it was.

Plagiarism.org was developed as a doctoral thesis and is used by many instructors to deter plagiarism. I found an article on this in a resource recommended by a fellow student. This resource Education-World was helpful.

Upon searching the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, I noticed that the abstract was available but the entire article was not. I assume many journals are open access or self-archived. I am not sure it this one is.