Evaluation of an intervention to help students avoid unintentional plagiarism by improving their authorial identity

Abstract

Students with poorly developed authorial identity may be at risk of unintentional plagiarism. An instructional intervention designed specifically to improve authorial identity was delivered to 364 psychology students at three post‐1992 universities in London, UK, and evaluated with before‐and‐after measures of beliefs and attitudes about academic authorship, using the Student Authorship Questionnaire. Changes in questionnaire scores showed that the intervention led to significantly increased confidence in writing, understanding of authorship, knowledge to avoid plagiarism, and top‐down approaches to writing, and significantly decreased bottom‐up and pragmatic approaches to writing. For understanding of authorship, knowledge to avoid plagiarism and pragmatic approaches to writing, significant intervention by year of study interaction effects showed that the greatest improvements were among year one undergraduates. Direct evaluative feedback showed that 86% of students believed the intervention helped them avoid plagiarism and 66% believed it helped them write better assignments. Post‐intervention focus groups revealed changed student understandings about authorial identity and academic writing. The results show that interventions can help students avoid unintentional plagiarism by adopting more authorial roles in their academic writing. Further research could explore other influences on authorial identity, and examine the impact of authorial identity interventions on other outcome indicators.

Keywords:

• authorship
• authorial identity
• plagiarism
• academic literacy
• writing

Acknowledgements

The project was funded by a Higher Education Academy Psychology Network Departmental Teaching Enhancement Scheme grant awarded to James Elander. Many thanks to all the students and staff who participated in the intervention and evaluation; to Kathryn Mitchell for helping to administer the project at University One; to Meme Pang for helping with the collection of assessment board data; to Katherine Harrington and Frank Su of the Write Now CETL for support and liaison with the CETL; and to a reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft.