Turnitin, the leading provider of plagiarism-detection software, is ubiquitous at the high school and college level. But I’ve always wondered if and when the service will be used in middle schools and, gasp, elementary schools. Well, Turnitin recently answered my query: middle schools are adopting it at “a fine clip,” but usage among elementary schools is rare. That latter, nonzero number is interesting — I would love to know how those elementary school teachers use it, potentially when some of their students cannot even read yet. As I’ve written elsewhere, elementary school is probably the best time to teach about authorship and honesty — it’s in those early grades that kids learn how to cut-and-paste, the plagiarizer’s favorite tool.
And for those districts that start using it with first graders, that means students will be exposed to plagiarism discussions for a good 12 years before they hit their first college course — that’s just amazing. If you’ve ever taught college students, you’ll know that when caught cheating, the top excuse is “but I didn’t know it was plagiarism … we never learned about that in high school.” With up to 12 (twelve!!) years of exposure, that certainly will be a lame excuse … though I’m sure they’ll still use it.
If anyone does research on the risk factors contributing to plagiarism among college students, it would be interesting to look at how their grade school teachers dealt with the plagiarism issue (ostriching, Turnitin, etc.). If you do it, please let me know …
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