Good images, effective messages? Working with students and educators on academic practice understanding

Abstract

Work at Northumbria University has focussed on activity that extends opportunities for students to engage directly with the skills development necessary for sound academic practice. This has included highly visual campaigns on the ‘Plagiarism trap’, providing access to Turnitin plagiarism detection software, guides and sessions to highlight use of associated referencing tools. Sessions on a variety of topics, such as supporting study skills and reading originality reports, have been provided for students on taught, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This provision has included students working on collaborative partners' sites and also those on research programmes. Alongside the activities with students, ‘designing out’ approaches have been embedded in staff development within the educator community at Northumbria. Formative use of Turnitin is integrated throughout programmes and academic practice development is formally recognised within the University Learning and Teaching Strategy's focus on information literacy. This article outlines and reviews these activities in a critical institutional context and evaluates responses from a variety of students and educators to determine how effective these measures have been.

Keywords:

• plagiarism
• academic misconduct
• academic practice
• Turnitin