Benefits

Veteran Teacher Shares His Experiences with Turnitin

Bruce Becker has taught high school English, social studies and humanities for 28 years in the Lake Washington School District in Redmond, Washington. He shares below his experiences with Turnitin, the world's No. 1 originality checking and plagiarism prevention service from iParadigms.

Becker says his journey with Turnitin began from an unexpected source: "I got a call from my son at college, and it was not about more money. 'Dad,' he said, 'check out this new anti-plagiarism site I have to turn my papers in to, turnitin. com.' Soon, I began to hear about it from colleagues. My revelation came when my son told me, 'I'm tired of competing against professional writers.' He was right. No student should have to compete against material that others cut and paste from the Internet and submit as their own.

"It became clear that using a service like Turnitin was not about 'playing gotcha.' It was about upholding academic honesty, rewarding those who do their own work, and encouraging young writers to find their own voices.

"I lobbied a proposal through my district, got trained and began training my colleagues. I made many joyful discoveries: a culture of implicit trust in my classrooms, students rededicated to their writing, credible high-stakes writing assessments, and paper grading as it should be — stress-free and focused on the writer's thoughts and style.

"Turnitin is intuitive, friendly, colorful, and timesaving—a big selling point with my colleagues. I just check my inbox, look at a few Originality Reports, and then do what I am supposed to do: grade papers without being side-tracked by questions of misappropriated prose. Turnitin catches that so easily. In three years I have never had a student push back about being caught. I called one student to my desk and explained that I'd found plagiarism in his assignment. He asked, 'Where?' I just spun my display around to show the color-coded report. His response was, 'Cool!' It was cool all right: he was busted. Some kids start out thinking they can game the Turnitin system, but this misconception all but disappears as the deterrent effect takes hold.

"Now, we take advantage of all the services offered by Turnitin: OriginalityCheck™, PeerMark® and GradeMark®. My colleagues have enthusiastically embraced this 100%-paperless classroom solution.

"How does it work? Papers are exchanged electronically and reading groups are conducted outside of precious class time. After building rubrics and clipboards of our most frequently used comments, my colleagues and I started grading papers in half the time! Gone are my chicken-scratch comments. Even better, students now arrive from junior high with established Turnitin accounts, habits and expectations. They prefer going paperless and make a smooth transition to high school with their electronic writing portfolios intact.

"As a recent trainee said, 'This is a fun service that's easy to use. Why can't our other tools be more like Turnitin?'"

Background

Lincoln-Way High School District 210, located in Illinois, serves families and citizens in a 105-square mile area with four high schools serving approximately 7,400 students. Students choose from a diverse curriculum including 1,075 traditional classes, 88 advanced placement courses, as well as courses not available at other high schools. Students have the opportunity to participate in 213 clubs and activities, as well as 108 athletic teams. Lincoln-Way primarily serves college-bound students who have both high attendance and high graduation rates.

Problem

The English department chairs at Lincoln-Way realized that student self-assessment was not where it should be in order to prepare high school students for their college career. They found it was difficult to have students take a step back from their written work and truly evaluate it. In addition, teachers were having a hard time separating real student writing from copied material in their robust assignments. Because of these issues, the district developed an initiative to enhance student self-assessment while providing its teachers with an easy way to delve deeply into student work.

Solution

Turnitin's GradeMark and PeerMark features have helped teachers at Lincoln-Way show students the benefits of self-assessment. English Department Chair at Lincoln-Way Central, Sandra Rogina, said, "Having students sit down with their papers to review and reflect on my feedback and the feedback from their peers has greatly supported our efforts. Our students are better at assessing their own writing skills after reading the peer review comments on their papers." Teachers at Lincoln-Way also incorporated a reflection exercise where the students reflect not only on their writing, but on their peer editing skills to see how they improved over the year.

Results

Lincoln-Way started the self-assessment and peer editing process with students taking advanced placement (AP) courses. "The nice thing about PeerMark and GradeMark is that students can see how others feel about their work. Students are able to read through the feedback and get in a teacher's or peer's mind set to think about what is being asked of them," said English Department Chair of Lincoln-Way West, Renae Goldie. Lincoln-Way has also found that the discussion boards feature of Turnitin has greatly helped students. "We have found those students who sit in the classroom and aren't as vocal, take on a completely different voice through Turnitin's discussion boards. Because students today live in this world of online communication, they are able to come alive online. Whatever skill I teach that day takes on a life of its own on the discussion board."

Introduction

Dr. Bruya integrated Turnitin into his introductory philosophy course four years ago. "Turnitin allowed me to assign and manage lots of short papers and not have to worry about trying to track down whether every paper is original work," he explains. "This is important because I think writing papers is a better way for students to learn philosophy than having to take a lot of tests."

Benefits

Provides an Efficient, Paperless System for Instructional Support

Turnitin is a complete set of web-based tools for managing writing assignments from beginning to end. This allows Bruya to handle hundreds of papers every week; he has to grade over 200 pages a week for just one class. "Using Turnitin enables me to have my students write short weekly assignments that I grade in batches," Bruya says. "Without Turnitin, I wouldn't be able to manage all that paper."

For an online course he teaches, Bruya evaluates students' essays using GradeMark®, the paperless mark-up and grading tool that is an element of the Turnitin solution. "I can easily revise and readily reuse my comments," Bruya says. "It's much better than pen and paper."

Gives Faculty More Time to Provide Students with Feedback They Need

GradeMark also helps instructors give students more meaningful feedback, so student learning doesn't end when the final paper is graded and returned. "When I teach philosophy," Bruya says, "I encourage students to think, as opposed to absorb information. The more they write, the better they think." Turnitin allows Bruya more time to respond to students more quickly, helping them to become better writers and thinkers.

Turnitin Beats the Alternatives

"The originality checking capabilities of Turnitin are much more thorough and comprehensive than other programs," Bruya explains. "Turnitin found major matches on a 100%-plagiarized paper that had been cleverly spliced together from a variety of samples from a paper mill website. Multiple submissions through another service failed to find any of these matches. The other service seems to stop searching for text matches in a paragraph as soon as any match is found — even if it's just a commonly-used phrase — and, as a result, may fail to highlight a completely plagiarized paragraph and make it appear to be OK."

Impact

Using Turnitin supports what this philosophy professor is trying to teach: rigorous thinking, not just processing and spitting back information. Bruya has been able to replace tests with lots of writing assignments. And the paperless process made possible by Turnitin clears clutter and lets him more easily and efficiently manage student work. "Turnitin has become part of how I conduct my classes and how my students learn," says Bruya.

Background

Natalie Block is an eighth grade math and science teacher at Steffen Middle School (SMS). Located in Mequon, WI in the Mequon-Thiensville School District, SMS serves 420 students in sixth through eighth grades.

Problem

Block's eighth grade students were in need of additional help learning the writing process. Many of them were improperly paraphrasing, making it look like they were intentionally plagiarizing. Block knew that if her students didn't learn proper paraphrasing in her class, they would not be given a second chance when they got to high school the following year. She needed a way to teach her students the appropriate way of citing material and writing in their own words.

Solution

Once Block had been introduced to Turnitin, she loved it. She recruited Turnitin to help teach her students how to improve their citations and paraphrasing. First Block assigned her science classes an article to read, summarize and reflect upon. Knowing that her students gather a bulk of their information from the Internet, she alerted them that their summaries and reflections were to be submitted to Turnitin.com and that any paper with 15 percent or more of matched content would require a rewrite by the student. Her first time doing this left several students surprised that they had to rewrite their papers.

Results

Block's eighth grade science classes did not like Turnitin at first. "My students realize that Turnitin makes them more accountable. It shows they have some things they need to work on."

At the beginning of the year many of Block's students were handing in article reviews that came back with a 30 percent match. As the year progressed, however, her class was down to less than five percent matching content. Block tells her students not to be embarrassed if their paper has a high percentage of matches. She explains that proper citations, quotes and names are all included in the percentage. "I show student's papers to the class and they shout "Please show mine, please show mine." They are eager to see the Turnitin.com matches and their matched percentage," said Block.