What do elementary students need to know about plagiarism?

The following ideas are presented in order to encourage all students to express themselves on every level by putting their ideas into their own words.  It takes lots of practice taking information and putting it into one's own words without repeating back exactly what was originally said.  This makes it difficult for elementary students to do "reports" on any topic, and be expected not to plagiarize.  Students tend to focus on the key vocabulary of the main idea in the same terms they've just heard it presented.  Another difficulty in elementary students have in creating reports would be that students "spit back" what they thought they heard, which can create inaccuracies.  It is perhaps for this reason why students tend to copy the ideas and vocabulary as how they were originally presented, thus plagiarizing, unintentionally at times, to show that they understood the original message.

Before we go on, what does the word plagiarism mean?

"Plagiarism is defined as the use or close imitation of another author's work, which has been claimed as your own. Be warned, if your university accuses you of plagiarism, you could face losing your place or suffer reduced marks.

To avoid plagiarism, you should always reference correctly according to your institution's guidelines..."

This is taken from the website (and promoted product Viper, the Anti-plagiarism Scanner) http://www.scanmyessay.com/

What does this mean to you?

When you do a report, you read the material that you are studying.  In order to write it for your own report, you have to rewrite the information in your own words.  In order to do this properly, you need to understand what you read, usually from more than one source (more on this later) so you can accurately retell the information without STEALING the words of someone else.  If you want to use a part of what someone else said, you just have to show what they wrote and who wrote it in order to give them credit.  You do this by putting quotation marks around their words like I did to the definition of plagiarism above from the Viper site.  You also need to show who said it, and that is where bibliographies come in.

What is the public domain?

That is a great question!  We will talk about this in a later session.