That leads back to a class session of deep-review. Last Thursday, I read through the summary rough drafts for class, and to my surprise a fair amount of students were just not getting the process of reading their articles and extracting the author's main points. So instead of introducing the Explanatory Synthesis assignment, as I had planned, Friday we all drowned-deep in heavy review of how to read and identify the main and sub points, and how to paraphrase without plagiarizing...
Last Thursday afternoon, I had sent out a very long and detailed message about my reactions to their rough drafts and a way we were going to work through the process of how to improve their drafts.
It was very cute on Friday morning how one of the students looked at me and said, "Were our papers that bad." In which I replied, "No, it wasn't that they were that bad, I just think some of you blew-off this assignment and didn't give it as much time as it needed." So with that, I broke the first and second plagiarizing paragraphs (on pg. 50 in the book), on the board and had students go up and paraphrase them. After the first student volunteered and wrote her paraphrase, I showed another way to paraphrase the same sentence and abandon the original language all together. It was like 18 to 23 little light bulbs had been flicked on as I explained my example of the same paraphrase. My initial thought of the plagiarism I saw in the rough drafts being unintentional was affirmed. For some reason, the students thought paraphrasing just meant switching the original source words around to make the sentence appear different.
I realized that allowing the students to look at my comments and ask me questions about them proved to be beneficial.
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