A Plagiarism Prevention Curriculum For Secondary Students

The question addressed by this curriculum development capstone was, how can students more easily learn the rules of source attribution, how to avoid plagiarism, and the importance of academic integrity? It details the creation of a seven-lesson plagiarism prevention curriculum intended for use in an eighth-grade English language arts classroom. The impetus for the curriculum included the creator’s personal experiences with student plagiarism in the classroom as well as the documented evidence of intentional and inadvertent plagiarism in secondary classrooms, colleges and universities, and professional publications. The capstone presents a survey of the literature on the subject of plagiarism, describes the backward design methodology used to create the curriculum, and details the lessons on integrity and authorship, summarizing and paraphrasing, and citation and source attribution. The curriculum was created as digital content that can be interwoven into a regular English language arts curriculum at different points throughout the school year