Teaching Tips
Here are some ideas you can use when teaching your classes.
- Online Discussion Groups as an Educational Tool
- Applying Mastery Learning in the College Classroom
- An Assignment That Helps Students Prepare For an Exam
- Strategies for Detecting Plagiarism
Online Discussion Groups as an Educational Tool
Even for classes that regularly meet face-to-face, online discussions can be an effective way for students to learn. Usually the faculty member posts an open-ended question, and then students respond to both the question, and to each others' answers. Discussions are typically asynchronous -- that is, students are not online at the same time and can post when they wish (within time limits for the discussion assignment).
This allows students to carefully think about what they say before posting their answer. They can refer to their textbook, lecture notes, or other materials to help them form an opinion. This ability to think about the material and do research before responding is an advantage students don't have in a traditional face-to-face discussion. This often creates a very thoughtful class discussion and produces deeper student learning.
For more information on using online discussion in your classes, read these articles:
- Designing and managing effective online discussions by G. Benfield (PDF)
- On-line discussions can improve student learning by M. Keller
Applying Mastery Learning in the College Classroom
Presented by Ron DelPorto & Carla Torgerson
- PowerPoint file
- Poster (PDF, presented at Lilly Conference on College Teaching)
An Assignment That Helps Students Prepare For an Exam
From Ruth Pflueger & Carla Torgerson
This assignment requires students to create a study guide for an upcoming test. You can download the Word file here, then change underlined areas to customize the assignment to your subject and class.
Strategies for Detecting Plagiarism
(thanks to Dr. Michael Christofferson for his assistance in writing
this)
Some of the signs of plagiarism include:
(from http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/cyberplag/ and http://www.library.ualberta.ca/guides/plagiarism/detecting/index.cfm)
- inconsistencies in formatting (such as straight quotation marks and curly or "smart quote" quotation marks), different style for the title page and body of the paper, varied bibliographic style (ie, APA and MLA in the same paper), etc.
- outdated references (such as 'Reagan, who is currently president...')
- lack of recent reference sources or unusual references
- the paper veers away from the assigned topic or ideas discussed in class
- changes in writing style or quality of writing within one paper
- use of false footnotes (that is, footnotes that do not refer to any source that the student has consulted and that are not the source of the plagiarized passage) in order to mislead the professor into believing that the writing is paraphrased from the footnoted source
Using the web to detect plagiarism:
There are several electronic tools that can be used to quickly check for plagiarism. Probably the best way is to go to a search engine and search for a key phrase from the paper or assignment. This allows you to quickly find if that part of the paper was copied from a website. Although there are many search engines on the internet, meta search engines such as Google (link to http://www.google.com/) and Dogpile (link to http://www.dogpile.com) will be better than a search engine like Yahoo.
When using a search engine to check for plagiarism, you should choose a phrase from the paper that is relatively unique, otherwise you'll match on several websites that were not the source of the student's paper. Also, picking out a few relatively unique words close to each other helps. If the first search does not yield results, and you still strongly suspect plagiarism, try a different combination of words or phrase. Using the advanced search features of the search engines is also important to ensuring successful searches.
It should be noted that very often students plagiarize from more than one source in the same paper. Since the extent of plagiarism is important to determining penalties, you might want to do multiple searches to see how much of the paper is plagiarized.
Using software to detect plagiarism:
There are also electronic tools that you can use. WCopyfind (http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/Wsoftware.html) is such a program and can be downloaded for free. It allows you to compare two files, but requires that you have both files electronically and does not compare a file to websites. There are also several programs that will compare a paper to a database of papers commonly found for purchase online. This software is usually not free, though. University Park recommends that you warn students in advance if you plan to use such a service, however, so students feel more at ease in your class.
For more information and resources, visit these sites:
- Cyberplagiarism: Detection and Prevention (Penn State University Park) - http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/cyberplag/
- Guide to Plagiarism and Cyber-Plagiarism (University of Alberta) - http://www.library.ualberta.ca/guides/plagiarism/index.cfm