Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

Home The Six Areas of Competence Support of Learning Design and Planning of Learning Activities Assessment and Giving Feedback Developing Learning Environments Evaluating Practice Using Research to Inform Teaching Role as a Professional Access Disability Diversity Accountability and Quality Critical Appraisals Group Project Individual Project Other Teaching Philosophy Mapping Document Reflective Statement Reference (Word) Statement of Intent Evidence	Individual Project Appraisal For my individual project I chose to investigate the issue of plagiarism and in particular to attempt to validate various assumptions I perceived about student attitudes to the problem. The results of the project were both an internal departmental report and conference paper in Plagiarism: Practice, Prevention and Policies. I found this a much more useful exercise than the Group Project and one which has resulted in several practical outcomes. There seemed to be a lack of clarity in students' minds about which specific activities might constitute plagiarism in a given instance and so I have now developed a "Plagiarism Paragraph" which I attach to all the courseworks I set which attempts to explain what will be considered plagiarism within the context of that coursework. An example of one of these follows: This exercise is intended to be done entirely on your own. You may give very general advice on Perl scripting to another person and may help with modifying groupinfo.html and addgroup.html, putting files in the correct directories and setting permissions correctly but you should not show them any of your own code nor should you look at any of theirs. You may give more help with writing HTML but this should be based on showing samples of HTML alone not the workings of your program. If you need to use some real Perl programs to demonstrate how all the CGI stuff works then you should use the sample programs provided during the module and linked from the module web page. You may share sample Group Information and Subgroup Information files if you wish and it is acceptable to give help in understanding the formats required for these files. If you are asked specific questions like ``How do I do this'' then you should do no more than point the questioner to the relevant parts of the lecture notes or a textbook. It is fine to help them with lab problems or the exercises in the textbook and suggest which ones may be relevant but you should never start discussing any parts of the solution to this exercise specifically. Copying of large sections (such as subroutines) or copying and making minor edits (such as changing variable names) will be considered cheating in exactly the same way as if you copy a whole script. I have also developed a tutorial work sheet based on the results of the project aimed at increasing students understanding of the nature of and issues involved in plagiarism. I was hoping to trial it with first year undergraduates this year but have not, in the event, been assigned any. However a couple of other members of staff have used it and report that it was useful in clearing up misconceptions, particularly ones surrounding the extend to which students should collaborate on programming exercises. As a result the School Teaching Committee has decided to recommend the work sheet to all first year tutors next year. The feedback from the PGCHE presentation on the project doesn't come in a form which can be trivially translated into averages for different aspects of the project. The majority of the feedback forms contain mostly "acceptable" ratings for each area with a smattering of "highs". There is no discernible pattern among the "lows" awarded and so its hard to draw any conclusions about weaknesses from these. The actual qualitative comments on the forms generally pick up on concerns I mentioned within the presentation itself or on the fact that I had more information to impart than time allowed. This relates to an effect I have noticed in all my presentations that I appear to be taking longer and longer to get through individual slides. I have generally managed time-keeping in presentations via a rough guesstimate of the number of slides I would get through in an hour - this has served me well in the past but is proving more unreliable as I become more experienced. This is a problem I have yet to satisfactorarily address. One of the valuable parts of this exercise is appreciating that changes and innovations made in my own teaching should be evaluated with the same degree of rigour as I would an innovation I proposed in my research area. Unfortunately time constraints mean that it is rarely practical to implement such an evaluation and that generally the normal feedback procedures (SET/SEM, SSCC, exam performance) have to be relied upon as discussed in Evaluating Practice. It was, however, good for once to be given a real impetus and support for performing a study like this even though I have reservations about the results (see papers) and would approach it differently another time and if more resource (in terms of time) were available. On the whole I am very pleased with the outcome of my individual project and have been pleasantly surprised by the number of measurable results (a report, conference paper, tutorial and "plagiarism paragraph") that have arisen from it.

Individual Project Appraisal

For my individual project I chose to investigate the issue of plagiarism and in particular to attempt to validate various assumptions I perceived about student attitudes to the problem. The results of the project were both an internal departmental report and conference paper in Plagiarism: Practice, Prevention and Policies.

I found this a much more useful exercise than the Group Project and one which has resulted in several practical outcomes. There seemed to be a lack of clarity in students' minds about which specific activities might constitute plagiarism in a given instance and so I have now developed a "Plagiarism Paragraph" which I attach to all the courseworks I set which attempts to explain what will be considered plagiarism within the context of that coursework. An example of one of these follows:

This exercise is intended to be done entirely on your own. You may give very general advice on Perl scripting to another person and may help with modifying groupinfo.html and addgroup.html, putting files in the correct directories and setting permissions correctly but you should not show them any of your own code nor should you look at any of theirs. You may give more help with writing HTML but this should be based on showing samples of HTML alone not the workings of your program. If you need to use some real Perl programs to demonstrate how all the CGI stuff works then you should use the sample programs provided during the module and linked from the module web page. You may share sample Group Information and Subgroup Information files if you wish and it is acceptable to give help in understanding the formats required for these files. If you are asked specific questions like ``How do I do this'' then you should do no more than point the questioner to the relevant parts of the lecture notes or a textbook. It is fine to help them with lab problems or the exercises in the textbook and suggest which ones may be relevant but you should never start discussing any parts of the solution to this exercise specifically.

Copying of large sections (such as subroutines) or copying and making minor edits (such as changing variable names) will be considered cheating in exactly the same way as if you copy a whole script.

I have also developed a tutorial work sheet based on the results of the project aimed at increasing students understanding of the nature of and issues involved in plagiarism. I was hoping to trial it with first year undergraduates this year but have not, in the event, been assigned any. However a couple of other members of staff have used it and report that it was useful in clearing up misconceptions, particularly ones surrounding the extend to which students should collaborate on programming exercises. As a result the School Teaching Committee has decided to recommend the work sheet to all first year tutors next year.

The feedback from the PGCHE presentation on the project doesn't come in a form which can be trivially translated into averages for different aspects of the project. The majority of the feedback forms contain mostly "acceptable" ratings for each area with a smattering of "highs". There is no discernible pattern among the "lows" awarded and so its hard to draw any conclusions about weaknesses from these. The actual qualitative comments on the forms generally pick up on concerns I mentioned within the presentation itself or on the fact that I had more information to impart than time allowed. This relates to an effect I have noticed in all my presentations that I appear to be taking longer and longer to get through individual slides. I have generally managed time-keeping in presentations via a rough guesstimate of the number of slides I would get through in an hour - this has served me well in the past but is proving more unreliable as I become more experienced. This is a problem I have yet to satisfactorarily address.

One of the valuable parts of this exercise is appreciating that changes and innovations made in my own teaching should be evaluated with the same degree of rigour as I would an innovation I proposed in my research area. Unfortunately time constraints mean that it is rarely practical to implement such an evaluation and that generally the normal feedback procedures (SET/SEM, SSCC, exam performance) have to be relied upon as discussed in Evaluating Practice. It was, however, good for once to be given a real impetus and support for performing a study like this even though I have reservations about the results (see papers) and would approach it differently another time and if more resource (in terms of time) were available.

On the whole I am very pleased with the outcome of my individual project and have been pleasantly surprised by the number of measurable results (a report, conference paper, tutorial and "plagiarism paragraph") that have arisen from it.

Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

The Six Areas of Competence

Role as a Professional

Critical Appraisals

Other

Individual Project Appraisal