Two passages in an article in The Australian caught my eye recently.

The article carries the headline “Tracey Bretag says schools must teach how to reference information from the internet” and the story, written by The Australian’s Education Editor Sheradyn Holderhead, opens:

TELL US: Should proper referencing be taught at schools?
UNIVERSITY students do not understand plagiarism and cheating rules because cutting and pasting from the internet has become common practice in schools, a leading academic warns.

Tracey Bretag, from UniSA, said students should be taught in primary school how to properly source and reference information from the internet and traditional resources to eliminate cheating habits.

Straightforward enough, though I did stop to think a moment about the difference between the headline and what Bretag is reported to have said in the third paragraph, the difference between “how to … reference information from the internet” and “how to … reference information from the internet and traditional resources.”  The internet is sexy. Traditional resources less so.

Would the story have been any different, would it have been published, if the reporter had written “Tracey Bretag, from UniSA, said students should be taught in primary school how to properly source and reference information to eliminate cheating habits”?

But it was a later pair of paragraphs in Holderness’s article which sent me scuttling to find the research report which led to Bretag being interviewed in the first place. Those paragraphs read:

Research led by Dr Bretag and published in Studies in Higher Education suggests that problems of academic integrity have been persistent for decades and rates of breaches remain relatively consistent.

The research included a survey of more than 15,000 students, which showed that about 1.3 per cent had a personal experience of an academic integrity breach.

The percentage is startling: only 1.3% of this very large sample of students at Australian universities claimed to have had “personal experience” of a breach of academic integrity.  This seemed to contrast most remarkably with other studies which show much higher rates of plagiarism. Indeed, it seems at odds with figures given earlier in the article, the number of cases confirmed at Australian universities in recent years.

A simple search soon found the paper,  Teach us how to do it properly! (Bretag et al) and the story is slightly different.

Firstly, the first of these later paragraphs.

Research led by Dr Bretag and published in Studies in Higher Education suggests that problems of academic integrity have been persistent for decades and rates of breaches remain relatively consistent.

I believe that this statement comes out of the Literature Review section of the study, where Bretag and her co-writers look at previous studeies into academic misconduct, and note:

Without exception, the key finding from all of these surveys has been that breaches of academic integrity are rife in colleges and universities around the world. In fact, little appears to have changed since Bowers’ first report in 1964 (Bretag et al, p 3).

Indeed, 75% of the students in Bowers’ survey admitted having engaged in at least one form of academic misconduct, while an Australian survey conducted in 2005 reported 72% of its respondents admitting to cheating at least once. “Relatively consistent” is right.

This of course does not square with the earlier paragraph,

The research included a survey of more than 15,000 students, which showed that about 1.3 per cent had a personal experience of an academic integrity breach (Bretag et al, p 3).

Nor does it square with numbers of incidents reported at various Australian universities, as given in Holderhead’s article.

The figure of 1.3% (that is, 201 of the 15,304 respondents) occurs several times in the paper, including the breakdown of the number of survey respondents who had received a letter regarding academic integrity, and the number of Australian (as against international) students who had lost marks due to breaches of academic integrity (pp 12-13).  Bretag and co-authors advise that this figure is “very low” (p 17).  We are also advised that the study did not seek to learn the rate of academic misconduct, but was more concerned with learning what students understood of “academic integrity” and their understandings of processes and procedures when breaches occurred.

Possibly most telling, despite the large number of students responding – 15,304. This represents only 10.8% of student numbers at the six universities which took part in the study. As noted in the paper, the possibility of self-selection bias is high (p 8).

This could certainly explain some of the discrepancies with other studies, and with known cases.

More important than discussion of the statistics is discussion of one of the main findings of the study, that many students felt they have had inadequate or insufficient training, receive different information from different instructors, or feel that the processes are not always fair or consistently followed. In particular, there is the statement of the student whose response led to the title of the paper. In answer to the question as to how the university might train students better, she responded:

Providing more support to students, rather than telling us all the consequences of breaching the academic integrity policy, teach us how to do it properly! This means doing it more than once (Bretag et al,p 12).

This is echoed as one of the main conclusions of the study :

It is not enough to give information to students; universities need to ensure that they provide a range of hands-on, engaging activities, repeated and reconfigured in various media and forums throughout the student programme (Bretag et al, p 18).

It is an instructive study, thought-provoking. The article in The Australian, which led me to this study, makes the point that the earlier we start teaching good practice, the better. Bretag suggests that we should build on “the virtues of honesty and trust” taught and inculcated in primary school.  She also suggests a need for joined-up practice:

At school, often students can cut and paste from the web and stick a reference at the end and it’s all hunky-dory but then when they do that at university, it’s plagiarism (Holderness).

It is a thought often voiced.

What does happen in our schools?  How early do thoughts of attribution occur? Is practice consistent?  Without thoughts of plagiarism or academic misconduct, it would be good to see no-blame research studies made into practice in our schools, the better to see what the problems are, and where they are.

References

Bretag, Tracey, Saadia Mahmud, Margaret Wallace, Ruth Walker, Ursula McGowan, Julianne East, Margaret Green, Lee Partridge & Colin James (2013). ‘Teach us how to do it properly!’ An Australian academic integrity student survey, Studies in Higher Education, DOI:10.1080/03075079.2013.777406.

Holderhead, Sheradyn (2013, May 10). Tracey Bretag says schools must teach how to reference information from the internet.  The Australian. Retrieved on 11 May 2013 from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/tracey-bretag-says-schools-must-teach-how-to-reference-information-from-the-internet/story-e6frg6n6-1226638948423.