Turnitin WriteCycle Teaches 21st Century Skills

Published on May 2, 2010 in Plagiarism. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

At the Virtual School Society Conference on April 22, 2010, we presented on “Improving Tomorrow’s Writers Today with WriteCycle.” Given today’s global economy and the ever-evolving workplace, today’s students need to learn how to develop inquiry, collaborate effectively, think critically, solve problems, make decisions and exhibit technical proficiency. Instructors often struggle with finding a balance between teaching students mandatory course content while enhancing their students’ 21st century skills, especially if it requires technological savvy. Many instructors are skeptical of whether technology is really the answer to better preparing students for tomorrow or whether it is just another distraction from important instructional content. In our presentation, we illustrated how WriteCycle can give instructors an opportunity to teach both content and skills while saving them time and increasing the amount and type of feedback on student writing.

As students write about course content and engage in higher-level cognitive thought processes, they learn better. Add the collaborative and self-assessment tools available through WriteCycle, and students begin to use technology to inquire, collaborate, make decisions, problem solve, etc. Instructors also can manage the assignments and feedback on those assignments all within the online learning environment.

Our whitepaper titled, “WriteCycle: A Web-Based Technology for Collaborative Writing and Learning” further discusses how WriteCycle correlates with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework and the American Association of Librarians standards for 21st Century Skills. We invite you to take a look.

Turnitin WriteCycle Among Favorite eLearning Tools

Published on April 16, 2010 in Plagiarism. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Turnitin WriteCycle’s PeerMark and GradeMark tools are listed in eLearn Magazine’s feature article “eLearning Tools for English Composition: 30 New Media Tools and Web Sites for Writing Teachers” by college instructor Keri Bjorklund. She writes:

“Want to get students away from simply commenting on grammatical or punctuation errors? They can conduct in-depth peer reviews using Turnitin [which] provides peer review questions that link critical thinking skills with writing skills. You can even create your own questions and require a minimum word count for students. This keeps down the yes/no answers and forces them to think about the essay in front of them.”

“Timely feedback is fundamental to student success, but for it to be effective, it must also be efficient. When it comes to responding to student writing, the following tools are huge assets to instructors. And when used in combination, they can transform mundane grading into interactive and powerful teachable moments.”

“Turnitin.com [offers a complete suite] of tools [Turnitin WriteCycle] for plagiarism checking, peer review [PeerMark], grading [GradeMark], and more (price quotes available upon request). Originally an anti-plagiarism site, Turnitin has evolved into an indispensible teaching and grading tool. Students upload essays, check the originality of their content against a database of papers, and learn how to avoid plagiarism. It’s also an electronic grading tool and a valuable resource for teaching citation and research. Peer review is another option that electronically disperses essays to students.”

“GradeMark [is a] paperless grading tool that’s part of WriteCycle [. . .] and it’s a tool I cannot live without. Simply drag and drop comments in any essay, quickly create and save personalized comments, create rubrics, or incorporate tools already available in GradeMark. It cut my grading time in half.”

Read about all of her other favorite tools in the article “eLearning Tools for English Composition: 30 New Media Tools and Web Sites for Writing Teachers” in eLearn Magazine.

References
Bjorklund, K. (2010 March 30). eLearning tools for English composition: 30 new media tools and web sites for writing teachers.” eLearn Magazine. Retrieved from http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=67-1.

Plagiarism Proofing Assignments with Turnitin WriteCycle

Published on April 8, 2010 in Plagiarism. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

In our first blog “Does Turnitin Detect Plagiarism?” we said that Turnitin does not detect plagiarism but, rather, generates a similarity index indicating text matches to the Turnitin databases. Instructors and their students can use that information to determine if  there are issues with intentional or unintentional plagiarism. So, while Turnitin does not specifically “detect” plagiarism, instructors can work towards plagiarism proofing their written assignments by implementing Turnitin and WriteCycle tools in their courses using some well-documented best practices.

Research suggests that assignments can be made more difficult to plagiarize if instructors:

• Emphasize the recursiveness of writing.1
• Require significantly revised multiple drafts.1
• Break an assignment into parts that are to be turned in at different stages of the creation process: pre-writing, drafting, revising, reflecting.1

This idea of plagiarism proofing assignments makes sense, suggesting that students are less likely to leave the work to the last minute—when research and writing skills may deteriorate or students might be tempted to use writing that is not their own—if they are engaged in writing as a process.

However, this type of assignment set up can seem burdensome to instructors, especially for content-area instructors who may not have the time to collect, manage and grade multiple drafts or assignments from each stage of the writing process.
Instructors can engage students in process writing by asking students to provide feedback to one another through collaborative peer  assessment activities and by encouraging students to assess their own progress through reflective self-assessments, but instructors need a tool to facilitate this work. WriteCycle (the combination of Turnitin Originality Checking, PeerMark online peer reviewing and GradeMark digital feedback) is such an instructional support tool that can:

• Engage students in the process from the beginning stages of writing.
• Hold students accountable for developing awareness, skills and scholarship.
• Develop prewriting with substance as students collaborate and discuss writing topics.
• Offer opportunities for self-assessment through Revision and Reflection Assignments.

Assessing students’ prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing is a daunting task for instructors given the sheer volume of writing activities for even a small number of students. Turnitin WriteCycle aids instructor management of written assignments throughout the writing process as it …

• Provides a central location on the web for instructors to manage and view student work.
• Helps instructors monitor and assess student progress throughout the writing process.
• Offers students better feedback and more meaningful feedback from various sources, such as Turnitin’s Originality Report, PeerMark’s online, collaborative peer reviews.
• GradeMark’s QuickMarks and rubrics.

When students are engaged in writing tasks, they are less likely to plagiarize, and Turnitin WriteCycle asks students to actively participate in self-assessment, peer collaboration and process writing. Instructors can monitor student progress throughout the writing stages of prewriting, drafting, revision and editing but further ensure that students receive more feedback and better feedback on their written work. Thus, Turnitin WriteCycle is a tool that does not detect plagiarism, per se, but can help instructors—and students—prevent it.

1 Writing @CSU (1993-2010). Strategies for a writing classroom. Retrieved from http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/plagiarism/classroom.cfm

Top 15 Misconceptions about Turnitin

Published on March 9, 2010 in Plagiarism. 0 Comments

Misconception 15:  Turnitin employs legions of writing experts to read and evaluate papers for plagiarism.
Reality: Turnitin receives over 200,000 papers daily, and no human reads the papers at Turnitin.  All papers are processed by our software, servers and databases.

Misconception 14:  Turnitin automatically evaluates and grades papers . . . eliminating the need for instructors to grade them.
Reality: Turnitin matches text similarity and does not grade papers for the instructors.  It is up to the instructor and/or student to determine whether the assignment exhibits plagiarism.

Misconception 13:  iParadigms has expertise in plagiarism and can render judgement on specific cases.
Reality: There is no “threshold” Similarity Index that is either “good” or “bad”–each Originality Report needs to be examined to understand what a student did and whether or not there is a problem.

Misconception 12:  Turnitin compares a paper against everything ever written . . . web pages, books, publications, unpublished works, etc . . .
Reality: There are sources that are not in Turnitin–especially if that material is only available in print.  But the sources that students typically use are largely included in Turnitin.

Misconception 11:  Matched text is likely to be completely coincidental or common knowledge.
Reality: The likelihood that a 16-word match is “just a coincidence” is less than 1 in a trillion.  Turnitin also includes the ability to exclude “small matches” if the instructor wants to exclude common phrases.

Misconception 10:  Students can easily “game” Turnitin to escape detection.
Reality: Once the student receives an Originality Report, they have to wait 24 hours to get another report on a re-submission, preventing students from wordsmithing and re-submitting repeatedly.

Misconception 9:  All students hate Turnitin.
Reality: Many students have stated that they like the fact that Turnitin helps maintain a level playing field. Turnitin protects students’ work from unauthorized use, and gives students who want to do their own work a good reason not to share their work with others.

Misconception 8:  Student copyrights are compromised in some way by Turnitin.
Reality: The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously affirmed that Turnitin’s archiving of work was not a copyright infringement because it falls within the fair use exception.  Please see our “Answers to Common Legal Questions about Turnitin.”

Misconception 7:  Every student paper submitted becomes part of the Turnitin database–forever.
Reality: Turnitin has many options–including the ability to offer students an “opt out” of the database and the option of having an institutional database of student papers.  Student papers may be removed only by request of the instructor of the class.

Misconception 6:  The source named in the Originality Report is the exact source used by the writer.
Reality: There can be many matches because of extensive duplications of material on the web.  The source named may not be the exact source the student used.

Misconception 5:  Papers in the Turnitin database are easily accessible by others so privacy is not protected.
Reality: Papers are secure from prying eyes.  No one can go into the student database.

Misconception 4:  An instructor can determine if a paper is OK or not from the Similarity Index % and doesn’t need to look at the Originality Report.
Reality: The Similarity Index must be interpreted in the context of the assignment and the actual writing. The only way to do this is to look at the Originality Report.

Misconception 3:  The “Similarity Index” shows the percentage of paper that is plagiarized.
Reality: The Similarity Index is just a percentage of material in the paper that matches sources in the Turnitin databases.  Text that is quoted and cited will be included in the Similarity Index, which offers a great opportunity to check for proper citation.

Misconception 2:  Turnitin works the same in all situations and is not flexible.
Reality: Turnitin has many options and settings for adapting Turnitin to your various institutional departmental, and individual needs. Instructors can decide to let their students see their reports, do re-submissions, get revised reports — or not.

Misconception 1:  Turnitin detects plagiarism.
Reality: Turnitin matches to text in our databases and leaves the judgement up to the instructor.  As mentioned above, instructors MUST look at the Originality Reports to determine if there is a problem.

Does Turnitin Detect Plagiarism?

Published on February 10, 2010 in Plagiarism. 22 Comments Tags: .

Welcome to WORDS & IDEAS, our blog about Turnitin and WriteCycle.

Lots of people have impressions about Turnitin – what it is, what it does, how it works. Unfortunately, many of these impressions are based on misconceptions. So to kick off our new blog, we’ll tackle the #1 misconception: that Turnitin detects plagiarism.

But isn’t that what Turnitin is – a plagiarism detector?  No, Turnitin does not detect plagiarism per se; Turnitin just finds text that matches other sources in the vast Turnitin databases and shows those matches. It is up to a human being to determine whether those text matches are a problem or not.

It is important to realize that the Similarity Index is NOT a “plagiarism index” – there is no score that is inherently “good” or “bad”. 0% does not necessarily mean that everything is OK with the student’s paper and 75% does not necessarily mean that the student should flunk. You have to look at the report and decide: what is going on here?

The Turnitin originality report shows the paper’s text highlighted with any text that matches sources found in the Turnitin databases containing vast amounts of web content, previously submitted papers, and subscription-based journals and publications.

It is up to the person looking at the matches to decide whether the writer’s intent matters. Some people care about intent; others do not.  Sometimes it matters; sometimes it doesn’t.

Since plagiarism is one of those topics that gets people all riled up (like politics and religion), there is no shortage of discussion on what it is, why it is complicated, and what to do about it. This is an important conversation with lots of shades of distinction – and that conversation should continue as today’s “digital natives” have become the “new normal” and they have a very different way of relating to content.

So does Turnitin detect plagiarism? No – Turnitin offers a tool that helps educators (and their students) make informed evaluations of student work rapidly and move on to the important task of discerning what their students need in the way of instruction, correction or judicial action.