Academic Integrity | Classroom Activities

In this section, you'll find:

• An ever-growing menu of classroom activities on academic integrity topics

Use and adapt - or let us do it for you.

Feel free to use and adapt these activities yourself, or let us do the work for you. Many of the activities below are ones that we have used in library and writing center instructional outreach and are already familiar with. Inviting the library or Writing Center to class has the added bonus of making us recognizable and more approachable for your students.

Why can't I just use a citation generator? 

• Provide a list of generated citations 
  • Use several different generators (EasyBib, Citation Machine, etc.) and databases or the library catalog
• In groups, students revise the citations.
• Groups then explain to the class what they changed and how they figured it out.

Citation as linking information & building credibility

• Discuss how non-scholarly sources cite their sources (hyperlinks, embedded info, etc.)
  • Provide students with a web article or blog post out of context with links removed
  • Ask students to read through the piece and consider where they would expect hyperlinks to contextualize information 
  • Compare that to the article in context with original links and discuss the differences between where students thought there would be links and where the author placed links
• Discuss how scholarly sources use citation (pointing readers to background information or more on the topic, legitimizing claims, etc.)
  • Provide students with a section of a scholarly article with citations removed
  • Repeat the steps above - where would students place citations? Where does the author actually?

Sample paper (or paragraph) group revisions

• Provide examples of bad paraphrases and summaries of a known text
• Ask students in groups to revise or do metacommentary on what is going wrong
• Provide an unformatted sample paper and go through how to do the formatting (whole class or small group) 
• Lots of variations depending on timeframe and scope
• NOTE: consider the ethics of using student papers as samples (i.e. ask first)

Class Turnitin revision 

• As a class (or in groups), examine a Turnitin report from a sample paper
• Interpret the scores in the report and revise the paper (or sections of the paper) based on the report

"Reverse" research 

• Find a source from a citation--this is easy to gamify to add competition and increase engagement
• "Backwards and forwards" research 
  • Have students search for articles from a starting point article--find articles that are cited by the starting point article, and find articles that cite the starting article.