History

**History**

 * Ted


 * Spring 2002 || As a graduate teaching assistant, I failed two comp students for plagiarizing their final papers. One students' father called my comp director expressing anger that his daughter (who had spent her spring break in South America building huts for //Habitat for Humanity//) was being accused of such a thing. My comp director (a poet) helped me get a grant to generate a handbook for our department (//Verifying and Dealing with Plagiarism: A Guide for the Composition Program at the University of North Dakota).// Though the handbook was later reproduced and used in several departments, it was poorly informed, the work of a first year MA student with //n//o comp background and no comp faculty. It did not yet occur to me that what seemed like shortcuts amounted to what Rebecca Moore Howard has called "patchwriting."

Since then, I have more carefully communicated my expectations to students, developing a PowerPoint presentation to help them understand. ||
 * Summer 2007 || In the Summer Institute for the //Live Oak Writing Project// in southern Mississippi, I developed a demonstration lesson from what I had used in my classroom and presented it to ~15 K-12 teachers. I was surprised to find out that many of them reported in their feedback that what I was saying was new information for them, especially when it came to paraphrase. ||
 * 2008 || Through the //Live Oak Writing Project//, I began offering the presentation as professional development for local high school faculty, which often revealed frequent misunderstanding of the difference between patchwriting and paraphrase. ||
 * Fall 2009 || In my first semester at BU, in my 300-level "Theory and Practice of Writing" class, I noticed that many of my students seemed to be misusing the assigned reading when they wrote their responses. Most of my teaching prior to this had been freshmen, so I was surprised to see so many students misusing sources. What I did for the first time was to disseminate an anonymous survey after the presentation. 11 of 21 students "Mostly" or "Strongly" agreed with the statement: "I have been taught not to plagiarize and believed that I understood, but now I believe I did not." 19 of 21 at least "Somewhat" agreed with that statement.

I went through IRB for an exempted anonymous survey process and spent the rest of that semester presenting to and collecting data from Comp 1&2 classes. (Data available on Pilot Data page) || I presented my results at the IWCA, where Mitch Nakaue, Matthew Capdevielle, and Suzanne Robertshaw expressed interest in conducting similar research on their campuses. Mitch described the project to Gwen Blume, who expressed interest in conducting research on her campus. ||
 * Spring 2010 || I continued the project by reaching as many upper-level classes from as many disciplines as I could. (Data available on Pilot Data page) ||
 * Summer &Fall 2010 || I concentrated on speaking to graduate students. (Data available on Pilot Data page).
 * Spring 2011 || I am writing grants and collaborating with the others to modify the presentation to include TurningPoint response cards so that we can collect more specific responses to more precise moments in the presentation.

Others might recreate the pilot study on their campuses to possibly create the argument that more research is needed. ||
 * Fall 2011 || My hope is that we will each conduct and collect data from several presentations on our campuses to bring to IWCA (In Miami)? We could also maybe continue to gather results for Spring CCCC?

At this point, also, we can begin to analyze our results and think about a collaborative publication. ||