29 March 2010

Anne-Marie Tarter & Marianne Baradnock's Pre-conference workshop

'Catching Them When They're Young: secondary school: strategies for tackling plagiarism'

Why do children plagiarise?  Is it because they are lazy, or afraid to fail, or lack confidence in their own ideas?  Or is it more the point that we may be asking the wrong questions and actually setting tasks that encourage children to regurgitate rather than to create new meaning?  These early experiences then set up a false view of research that can last a lifetime.

This workshop will look at ways in which some secondary schools are tackling plagiarism more from a change of mind about what constitutes research than from using methods to ‘catch the cheat’.  By developing pupils’ confidence in using research as a method of improving their own thinking, schools can produce learners who know how to engage with new information meaningfully.  The focus will be on practical examples that could be adapted for use in most primary and secondary schools.