Abstract:

The wide penetration, ease of access and availability multiplatform and mobile Internet, along with its use in academia, as a documentary source potential and possibilities that give comfort and word processors to copy, paste and edit large amounts written material have caused, among other factors, a spectacular and certainly disturbing increase in practices constituting plagiarism by students (Underwood and Szabo, 2003; Born, 2003, Campbell, 2006; Rimer, 2003; Scanlon, 2003; Sunderland-Smith, 2008; Sureda and Comas, 2009). Therefore, it is no coincidence that in recent years, plagiarism has become the focus of studies on academic integrity (Comas 2009). As Bertram argues Galan (2006), the empirical analysis in this field has been consolidated since the nineties of the last century, despite the prior existence of unique approaches and significant contributions as Browers (1964), Singhal (1982) and Haines, Diekhoff, LaBeff and Clark (1986).

In the present paper authors describe the results of a survey, based on the administration of a questionnaire, carried out amongst 356 secondary education teachers of the Balearic Islands (Spain). The main objectives of the study, and the data used to elaborate this work, were to analyze and describe the frequency of academic plagiarism amongst secondary education students based on the experience of the teachers. Teachers participating had to respond the frequency in which they had discovered some forms of plagiarism in the essays of their students in the course 2011-2012 –a whole academic year-. Results show that the most prevalent forms of plagiarism are the ones described as cyber-plagiarism (copying and pasting text retrieved from the Internet, downloading from the Internet and presenting as own whole essays, translating existing essays from the Internet and presenting them as original), and less frequent were the cases of plagiarism from printed materials and from essays of previous years.
Results suggest the need of increasing the measures of detecting and preventing the commission of academic plagiarism amongst the secondary education students that should be based on the conjunction of:
a) Development, establishment and implementation of academic rules and honor codes
b) Training and awareness of students and teaching staff
c) Development and implementation of detection systems and control

This paper was developed under the Research & Development project "The academic plagiarism among students of Compulsory Secondary Education of the Balearic Islands", funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (EDU2009-14019-C02-01) and involving a team of researchers from the Universities of the Balearic Islands. The co-authors of this paper are members of the research group “Education and Citizenship” based at the Balearic Islands University that has consideration of Competitive Group and is sponsored by the Autonomous Community of the Balearic Islands, through the Directorate General for Research, Technologic Development and Innovation of the Ministry of Innovation, Interior & Justice, and has co-financing FEDER funds.

Keywords:

Plagiarism, secondary education, teachers, integrity.