This is funding to support the development of Gaming Against Plagiarism (GAP), an online, self-directed, interactive game that provides a role-playing environment in which Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) graduate students learn to recognize and avoid plagiarism. The goal is to train STEM graduate students in U.S. institutions of higher learning to function effectively and ethically as authors within multi-national research teams. Given the substantial documentation of significant differences in cultural attitudes towards plagiarism, cutting-edge 21st century science will require a common ground for preparing and publishing results in the scientific literature. GAP will provide this common ground. To this end, GAP will employ strategies to affect behaviors that influence students' ethical choices, including peer behavior, institutional norms, and differing cultural practices. It will be collaboratively designed, tested, and evaluated by means of an iterative development process by an interdisciplinary team of experts in graduate science education, gaming, academic integrity, intellectual property rights, and educational digital media production. Six NSF Engineering Education awardee institutions (Purdue University, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Houston, Loyola Marymount University, Oakland University, and Rowan University), along with the College of Sciences at the University of Central Florida, have agreed to assist the PI in the testing and iterative refinement of the GAP intervention. The GAP project will be open source and freely available to these institutions and others, in order to create the broadest possible national impact.
Broader Impacts: GAP will be tested during development to ensure that it is both adaptable and scalable across a wide spectrum of American higher education settings. The game's open source platform will enable universities across the nation to download the software and to incorporate modifications to serve the needs of the particular institution (e.g., to integrate their own code of conduct, relevant policies, and branding) while maintaining a common focus on what constitutes responsible conduct of research. Although the initial game will emphasize plagiarism, the platform will be specifically designed so as to accommodate additional game development on other ethical issues (such as the falsification of data).
In 2010, the librarians from the Marston Science Library, and their partners at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida received a grant for $298,000 to create an online, interactive game for graduate students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). This game, Gaming Against Plagiarism (GAP), focuses on the identification of and how to avoid the three major types of academic misconduct in the sciences. These three major types are plagiarism, falsification of data, and fabrication of data. GAP's intellectual merit lies in its goal of training STEM graduate students in U.S. institutions to function effectively and ethically as authors within multi-national research teams. The broader impacts of GAP are its adaptability and scalability across a wide spectrum of American higher education settings. The game is freely available for download and will allow each institution to integrate its own code of conduct, relevant policies, and branding while maintaining a common focus on what constitutes responsible conduct of research. GAP comprises three distinctly different mini-games. Each game has it's own goals and learning outcomes. Mini-game 1 is entitled: Cheats and Geeks. Students race to become published authors. Along the way, they are tested with mini-quizzes about key content areas. They are also given the opportunity to cheat in ways that mimic actual misconduct (e.g. fabrication). There are a number of pedagogical and design strategies built into this mini-game, including the opportunity to explore the consequences of one's actions. Well-designed games promote higher order thinking skills by giving opportunities to perform and to explore multiple paths. Mini-game 2 is entitled: Frentic Filing. In this game, players are asked to take papers to a reviewer. The reviewer describes the paper and asks the player to correctly file it. For instance, the reviewer might describe the file as "using fragments from several uncited sources." Players must decide whether there is a misconduct and, if so, how to label the misconduct (e.g. patch-writing). The game draws on an older arcade style motif where players must apply their knowledge more quickly as the game progresses. It also provides opportunities for players to get feedback on wrong choices. Mini-game 3 is entitled: Murky Misconduct. Based on a film noir approach, the objective of the game is for players to collect clues to support their new role as the campus plagiarism detective. Players have the opportunity to put the knowledge they have gained into practice as they try to solve a whodunit. This higher order skill of application of knowledge is an important opportunity for players as it brings the knowledge and skills into practice. The three games are presented as evidence of the successful completion of the four main objectives of the research and development project. By using mini-games, the team created a scalable and robust design that is pliable enough for future implementation across multiple environments and scenarios). The games have been created with pedagogical strategies in mind, utilizing key features such as practice, feedback, higher order thinking, and acquisition of new knowledge. Finally, each of the three games, different in their own right, all provide opportunities for players to engage in real life scenarios they have faced or will face as global researchers in multi-cultural environments. The most notable deliverable at the conclusion of this grant is a series of mini-games that attempts to promote a deeper understanding of plagiarism at multiple post-secondary levels. These three games provide opportunities for students to explore the consequences of cheating, address issues of misconduct, and to become part of the plagiarism solution.Future work in this area should look at long term testing of such games. Research and development would also focus on the continued impact of cultural and historical systems of understanding and addressing plagiarism.