Minimizing Plagiarism Incidence in Research Writing in One State University in the Philippines

Abstract

Plagiarism has been an issue in higher education institutions all throughout the globe. The prevalence of this issue has been reported by numerous studies and literatures. However, only few are reported to conduct a study on the prevention of this case. Hence, this study was conducted aiming to minimize the occurrence of plagiarism among teacher education students to increase academic integrity and honesty by utilizing plagiarism detector software (Turnitin). Sixty one (61) teacher education students were selected at the average effect size of 0.5 and subjected into two weeks treatment. One sample pre-test post-test design of quasi-experiment was utilized. Data were gathered using the plagiarism software (Turnitin) on the submitted research manuscripts of the students and compared the similarity indices of the papers before and after the utilization of Turnitin using Paired T-Test statistical treatment at 5% alpha level of significance. Results showed a significant decrease on the similarity index of the submitted manuscripts of the teacher education students before and after the utilization of Turnitin. Through triangulation, several factors were identified influencing students to commit plagiarism such as self-resourcefulness, academic culture, and weak plagiarism detection scheme. Finally, the paper gives set of recommendations to further minimize the incidence of plagiarism.