Re: Can plagiarism be good?

[Constance Vidor <cvidor@CNCT.COM>]

Kids at Elementary and Middle School CAN produce good
reports/essays/research products that don't plagiarize,
but they need lots of help to do that.  It is useless
to simply assign a topic and say, "Now DON'T COPY."  They
need a format or a perspective or an organizing principle
that FORCES them to re-phrase and re-combine their notes
in ways that make the information personal.

I DO allow my students to copy some short phrases
word-for-word on note cards WITH a citation and quotation
marks, however, I try to make the final product of such
a nature that it is impossible to simply paste and copy.

Some sample formats:

Find information about the life of _____________(you name it--
could be an animal or a type of person from a certain
historical period or an actual person from history or
even a plant) and re-write those facts in the form of
a narrative describing a typical day in that person/animal/
plant's life.

Find information about ____________________ and prove or
disprove a thesis statement regarding the topic.  I feel it
is helpful to provide a range of thesis statements or
pivotal questions for the students rather than expecting them
to generate their own.

Compare and contrast the experiences of two people from
history, for example, a Medieval Japanese Samurai and a
Medieval English knight, and say which you would rather be
and why.   Or compare and contrast a Medieval castle with
a Baroque palace and say which you would rather live in and
why.  You get the idea.

Starting last year, I have begun to actually do some of the
research projects that I assign to the students.  I can't
overemphasize how valuable this process is.  It always
teaches me something about how to structure the assignment--
and gives me a model project to show the students so that they
know exactly what I expect.  I also am trying to construct some
really bad examples, such as "The Worst HyperStudio Stack in
the World" in order to provide additional guidance.

I'm very interested to hear how other people address this
issue.

Cheers,

Constance Vidor
Librarian
The Cathedral School
New York, New York

cvidor@cnct.com

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