Posts
Carmen Noel Eichman-Door, currently an adjunct English instructor and first-year writing specialist at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown, PA says, I teach research-based Composition II courses
every semester.
 |
| The Research Paper that Thwarts Plagiarism |
My students learn information literacy, look up
academic, peer-reviewed journals, create and correctly structure works
cited pages, annotate bibliographies, learn rhetorical writing
strategies, read diverse authors, watch diverse films, and discover the
purpose of audience. Their pinnacle assignment: Construct the research
essay—that oft-dreaded chunk of work students would just as well leave
until the last moment.
And therein lies the potentially plagiaristic problem—waiting until the last minute. When students wait until the last minute, they discover that looking up research articles isn’t as simple or fast-paced as they thought. At this point, panic mode presents itself. This usually corners them with several options: Not do it, recycle an old essay, plagiarize bits and pieces, or purchase an essay online.
This often happens to struggling students, and suddenly you receive an almost impeccably written essay with a more sophisticated sounding, graduate student vocabulary. Or they’ve been practicing MLA works cited, and you get an essay written in Chicago Style. By refining my curriculum, I came up with a fool-proof way to not only help students learn to write a research paper but to write their own research paper. How? It’s not that hard.
We begin constructing the research paper at the start of the semester, and we construct it in stages throughout the semester...
Once they have constructed half of the paper, they put it in finished form and turn it in. I then grade that first half. This gives me the opportunity to provide feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. In the meantime, they begin roughing out the paragraphs for the second part of the paper, but I don’t grade this second half by itself. What happens is by the time they’re finished roughing out the second half, I give them the opportunity to revise the graded first half. This encourages them to look at the second half with more critique after my feedback on the first half. They often realize common editing mistakes in their own writing, such as leaving out a direct quote or forgetting an exposition sentence or logical discussion resulting in an undeveloped paragraph.
Read more...
Source: Faculty Focus
