SECONDARY EDUCATION TEACHERS IN FRONT OF ACADEMIC PLAGIARISM PHENOMENON: DETECTION AND PREVENTION STRATEGIES

The phenomenon of academic dishonesty among students in High school has increased significantly in recent years (Sureda et al., 2011). This fact has provoked an increased awareness against this kind of practice, but it hasn’t yet triggered the adoption of strategic mitigation measures: Spanish teachers have expressed their helplessness in front of the evolution of this phenomenon (Mut et al ., 2012). Regarding this situation, the aim of this paper is double: firstly, to analyze the perspective of secondary teachers on the phenomenon of plagiarism in their daily practice (detection levels and frequency and main reasons why they believe that students commit academically dishonest actions, etc.); secondly, to identify the relationship between some variables that determine the identified levels of detection, allowing the implementation of these measures proposed by teachers interested in preventing plagiarism in academic work of their students. The present paper is based on the results of a study conducted by the research group based at the Balearic Islands University “Education and Citizenship” as part of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, entitled "Academic cyberplagiarism among students in Secondary Education"(EDU2009-14019-C02-01). In particular, the results showed in this paper were obtained through surveying a representative sample of secondary school teachers (n = 356) during the academic year 2011-2012. The data analysis has been conducted with SPSS statistical package using an analysis of frequencies and correlation testing. Among the results obtained should be noted the difference between the levels of detection of different actions considered plagiarism by teachers, and that the main reasons that teachers believe that students develop these practices are laziness performing the work and the easiness that confers Internet for conducting these academically dishonest actions. Finally, the results show a strong relationship between the number of works demanded by teachers and the level of detection of different types of academic plagiarism, increasing the number of plagiarism detection among the teachers who demand a low number of coursework. All this data suggests some intervention measures to the education community in general and among Secondary school teachers in particular; all these measures require an awareness of this phenomenon and the adoption and transformation, for example, on the type of coursework and essays demanded for the knowledge assessment.