The suggested improvements sound very much like the involvement librarians crave to contribute to classrooms, but all to often are precluded from. What follows is a rather long excerpt from that article (italics and boldface are mine):
Students are "dragging sentences out of random, simplistic sources and pasting them together in an often incomprehensible pastiche" of sentences, Ms. Howard said in presenting the data at a conference this year.
"How much plagiarism goes away if students actually know how to read and write from sources?" she asks The Chronicle. "My guess is: a lot."
At the conference, Ms. Howard elicited gasps from her audience when she showed one student paper from the project. The eight-page paper, about genetically modified foods, drew nearly half of its source material from the first page of a three-page WebMD article. Basically, the student took that text and broke it up with nine citations and a few original phrases.
The example illustrates broader trends. Students use books and journals, and they generally know how to cite them. But what they cite tends to come from the first page of a source, the project found. They pull "killer quotes" rather than engage with the overall argument. Almost half the time, they cite sources four pages or fewer in length.
On the basis of that research, Ms. Howard calls for a "fundamental shift" in how writing is taught. Professors should focus more on starting the research process collaboratively with students, she says. They should select a few complex sources and explore them with the whole class.
"What that means is not rushing students quite so quickly in their first semester in college into writing a 25-page research paper written from 15 sources," she says, "but rather taking them through the process of engaging with those sources first."
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