ACADEMIC PLAGIARISM AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: TWO VARIABLES CLOSELY RELATED

The study of academic plagiarism among students has become, in recent years, an area heavily exploited (Comas & Sureda, 2010). There are many empirical approaches to the phenomenon of plagiarism from university levels -undergraduate and postgraduate-while it exists shortage of analysis focused on secondary education levels (Comas et al., 2011). It is this question that, from our point of view, should be changed, since it is especially necessary to improve knowledge of the phenomenon of plagiarism in the lower levels of the educational system and take action as soon as possible and not wait for the arrival of students to college.

This work follows this line because it presents data from a study in the Balearic Islands, by the research group "Education and Citizenship" based at University of Balearic Islands, on the prevalence in the commission of plagiarism among students of secondary education and furthermore analyzes the relationship between the commission of plagiarism and academic achievements-results of students. The research methodology is based on the administration of a questionnaire to a representative sample of students in the Balearic Islands (n = 1503). Data processing was based on the use of the SPSS Statistical Package. The results show that the most frequent practices of plagiarism have to do with the use of Internet as a documentary source: what is considered academic cyberplagiarism. It also highlights the fact that students who have repeated a course have higher frequencies of plagiarism commission than students who have never repeated a course.

Data obtained by the study, on the one hand, suggests that most of the plagiarism committed by high school students is based on copying of resources available online. Second, the results suggest that academic competence and motivation of the students involved as explanatory factors of academic plagiarism among students: a worse academic results more likely to copy in the development of academic essays.

This paper was developed under the Research & Development project "The academic cyberplagiarism among students of Compulsory Secondary Education", funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (EDU2009-14019-C02-01 and EDU2009-14019-C02-02) and involving two teams of researchers from the Universities of the Balearic Islands and Cadiz.