Gaming Against Plagiarism

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

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).