Promoting Integrity at the Classroom Level:
Help Students Become Scholars
Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Barbara Fister (2002) observes that, "students sent into the library to work on a paper or presentation must invent themselves as scholars"”but we often neglect to explain what that really means, other than giving them a Byzantine set of rules on how to cite sources and dire warnings of plagiarism."
Too often, students do not see that the work they are doing is authentic; that they are not doing real scholarship. (Moore, 2001; Saunders, 1993) As a result, they become product oriented and forget about the process. (Coffey and Casey, 2001; Lathrop and Foss, 2000)
We can help students learn to be scholars by
- Developing assignments that have real world connections
- Making sure that students understand why the assignment is not just busy work
- Stressing process over final product
- Assigning digital literacy projects