Education and Information Technologies, Nov 5, 2023
Abstract
Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not si... more Abstract Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices, supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing. Keywords Plagiarism scoring rubric · Academic writing · Plagiarism severity calculation · Ethics of scholarships · English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article o... more Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices, supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing.
Policy makers and mainstream news anchors have promised the public that the COVID-19 vaccine roll... more Policy makers and mainstream news anchors have promised the public that the COVID-19 vaccine rollout worldwide would reduce symptoms, and thereby cases and deaths associated with COVID-19. While this vaccine rollout is still in progress, there is a large amount of public data available that permits an analysis of the effect of the vaccine rollout on COVID-19 related cases and deaths. Has this public policy treatment produced the desired effect? One manner to respond to this question can begin by implementing a Bayesian causal analysis comparing both pre-and post-treatment periods. This study analyzed publicly available COVID-19 data from OWID (Hannah Ritchie and Roser 2020) utlizing the R package CausalImpact (Brodersen et al. 2015) to determine the causal effect of the administration of vaccines on two dependent variables that have been measured cumulatively throughout the pandemic: total deaths per million (y1) and total cases per million (y2). After eliminating all results from countries with p > 0.05, there were 128 countries for y1 and 103 countries for y2 to analyze in this fashion, comprising 145 unique countries in total (avg. p < 0.004). Results indicate that the treatment (vaccine administration) has a strong and statistically significant propensity to causally increase the values in either y1 or y2 over and above what would have been expected with no treatment. y1 showed an increase/decrease ratio of (+115/-13), which means 89.84% of statistically significant countries showed an increase in total deaths per million associated with COVID-19 due directly to the causal impact of treatment initiation. y2 showed an increase/decrease ratio of (+105/-16) which means 86.78% of statistically significant countries showed an increase in total cases per million of COVID-19 due directly to the causal impact of treatment initiation. Causal impacts of the treatment on y1 ranges from-19% to +19015% with an average causal impact of +463.13%. Causal impacts of the treatment on y2 ranges from-46% to +12240% with an average causal impact of +260.88%. Hypothesis 1 Null can be rejected for a large majority of countries. This study subsequently performed correlational analyses on the causal impact results, whose effect variables can be represented as y1.E and y2.E respectively, with the independent numeric variables of: days elapsed since vaccine rollout began (n1), total vaccination doses per hundred (n2), total vaccine brands/types in use (n3) and the independent * Kyle A. Beattie is a Political Science PhD student with a focus on corruption studies.
Most universities require some type of English proficiency exam to determine if students are capa... more Most universities require some type of English proficiency exam to determine if students are capable of confronting the challenges associated with higher-level education in a foreign language; consequently, many forms of proficiency exams exist, and are in active use variably throughout the English-speaking world. For the purpose of this focused paper, I will concentrate my assessment and critique on the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet Based Test (TOEFL iBT) as it is the proficiency exam I am most familiar with; specifically I will review the Reading section of the exam. To accomplish this completely, it would be necessary to evaluate the exam based on the many standards for assessment evaluation including, reliability, authenticity, practicality, validity, and washback. As I intend this paper to be concise, and this section of the TOEFL iBT is rather extensive, I will be unable to center my analysis on all five of the previously mentioned standards. Instead, I will compromise with an effective triangulation focusing on three of, in my opinion, the most applicable standards to this section of the exam: authenticity, predictive validity, and washback.
Case Study: Differentiation in a Diverse Classroom, 2015
This paper will give a detailed explanation of the adult language classroom that I have been obse... more This paper will give a detailed explanation of the adult language classroom that I have been observing and teaching in for the past two months in Eureka, California. In the first part of this paper, I will document the context of this classroom, the students, their particular learning levels, the cultural factors at play, and other pertinent information to explaining the intense diversity of this classroom. I will then argue that this class’s large amount of academic diversity requires appropriately differentiated instructions, classwork, and activities for the different leveled students to be as successful as possible. Subsequently, I will propose a solution involving the use of language centers for half the class time where the advanced students could work independently, with other modalities (i.e. computers, books, audio), and in groups/pairs to encourage a more active role in their own learning. I will argue, furthermore, that this solution will not only give the instructor more time to spend with the beginner students in the class, but will also promote learner autonomy with the more advanced students. Finally, I will detail my expert consultant’s responses to this proposed solution, and follow with a closing statement of the most important things I have learned from this Case Study.
This paper diligently explains an ethnographic study I performed at Humboldt State University’s (... more This paper diligently explains an ethnographic study I performed at Humboldt State University’s (HSU) International English Language Institute (IELI) in Arcata, California during the spring of 2015. This paper includes a description of the ethnography’s purpose, theoretical focus, focal student and his academic environment, as well as, the methodology I used to obtain my data, and the limitations to information gathering that I encountered. In addition, this paper includes an analysis from a sociolinguistic perspective on the effect of the focal student’s motivation and identity on his English language acquisition (ELA). Furthermore, I have included a summary of my conclusions from this data as well as my personal recommendations for the focal student’s continued academic success. I conclude with a personal reflection about the experience of doing this ethnography including what I learned, how my skills improved, and how these types of intercultural exchanges can help create a world of better-prepared students, and more informed teachers.
To Boldly Go - An Analysis of Split Infinitives, 2016
“…to boldly go where no one has gone before.” –Star Trek
This paper will attempt to investigate ... more “…to boldly go where no one has gone before.” –Star Trek
This paper will attempt to investigate the use of the prescriptive English grammar rule that likes to persistently insist that the italicized words I just typed are not a correct usage of grammar. To accomplish this I will first investigate and detail the opinions of three English grammar sources on the rule of split infinitives. These sources will include the Oxford Guide to English Grammar by John Eastwood (1994, 2002), the Microsoft Word Grammar Check standard throughout the (American) English-speaking world, and the writings of Oliver Kamm, a British linguist and writer of the weekly Times column “The Pendant”; a column that is notorious for its non-prescriptivist tendencies. I am choosing such diverse perspectives on grammar rules deliberately to help discover more about the debate over this rule.
Furthermore, I will be using the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, and the British National Corpus to do a series of searches across contemporary, spoken, American, British, and academic language sets. These searches will consist of simple two-part split infinitive phrases, the preposition to with a range of adverbs, plus a common verb. For example: [to usually] + [want], [to really] + [need], [to luckily] + [verb], [to barely] + [verb]. From the search results I will descriptively analyze where this prescriptive grammar rule is still being observed and by whom. Finally, I will provide a brief analysis of why I think I obtained the results I did and how they might affect my own teaching practice.
Keywords: prescriptivism, descriptivism, infinitive, corpus
This paper will explore the linguistic differences between the Spanish and English languages whil... more This paper will explore the linguistic differences between the Spanish and English languages while highlighting the effects these differences have on English language learners (ELLs) whose first language is Spanish. As a fluent Spanish speaker and teacher in California, and a native English speaker and teacher in Peru, I will use my in-depth personal knowledge and teaching experiences with these languages to guide this research and to help identify key learner challenges. I will argue that Spanish speaking ELLs carry an advantage over adult speakers of many other languages in that the academic writing of English consists largely of Latin cognates with Spanish, thus making the process of learning words like “transportation” (transportación), analyze (analizar), or “process” (proceso), that much easier. Conversely, many Spanish speaking ELLs have extreme difficulty learning many of the basic words in English, especially the irregular verbs that come largely from English’s Germanic past. Based on these premises I will argue for a two-pronged approach for teachers with Spanish speaking ELLs: Teachers with older students should use the students’ in-depth knowledge of Latin cognates to develop academic vocabulary while simultaneously helping students discover the historical reasons behind the irregular verbs and non-cognate words that exist in English. Teachers with younger students should help them learn the irregular verbs and non-cognates through memorization and social interaction coupled with a cursory overview of a few basic cognates specifically highlighting the sound of the words rather than their technical history.
Education and Information Technologies, Nov 5, 2023
Abstract
Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not si... more Abstract Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices, supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing. Keywords Plagiarism scoring rubric · Academic writing · Plagiarism severity calculation · Ethics of scholarships · English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article o... more Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices, supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing.
Policy makers and mainstream news anchors have promised the public that the COVID-19 vaccine roll... more Policy makers and mainstream news anchors have promised the public that the COVID-19 vaccine rollout worldwide would reduce symptoms, and thereby cases and deaths associated with COVID-19. While this vaccine rollout is still in progress, there is a large amount of public data available that permits an analysis of the effect of the vaccine rollout on COVID-19 related cases and deaths. Has this public policy treatment produced the desired effect? One manner to respond to this question can begin by implementing a Bayesian causal analysis comparing both pre-and post-treatment periods. This study analyzed publicly available COVID-19 data from OWID (Hannah Ritchie and Roser 2020) utlizing the R package CausalImpact (Brodersen et al. 2015) to determine the causal effect of the administration of vaccines on two dependent variables that have been measured cumulatively throughout the pandemic: total deaths per million (y1) and total cases per million (y2). After eliminating all results from countries with p > 0.05, there were 128 countries for y1 and 103 countries for y2 to analyze in this fashion, comprising 145 unique countries in total (avg. p < 0.004). Results indicate that the treatment (vaccine administration) has a strong and statistically significant propensity to causally increase the values in either y1 or y2 over and above what would have been expected with no treatment. y1 showed an increase/decrease ratio of (+115/-13), which means 89.84% of statistically significant countries showed an increase in total deaths per million associated with COVID-19 due directly to the causal impact of treatment initiation. y2 showed an increase/decrease ratio of (+105/-16) which means 86.78% of statistically significant countries showed an increase in total cases per million of COVID-19 due directly to the causal impact of treatment initiation. Causal impacts of the treatment on y1 ranges from-19% to +19015% with an average causal impact of +463.13%. Causal impacts of the treatment on y2 ranges from-46% to +12240% with an average causal impact of +260.88%. Hypothesis 1 Null can be rejected for a large majority of countries. This study subsequently performed correlational analyses on the causal impact results, whose effect variables can be represented as y1.E and y2.E respectively, with the independent numeric variables of: days elapsed since vaccine rollout began (n1), total vaccination doses per hundred (n2), total vaccine brands/types in use (n3) and the independent * Kyle A. Beattie is a Political Science PhD student with a focus on corruption studies.
Most universities require some type of English proficiency exam to determine if students are capa... more Most universities require some type of English proficiency exam to determine if students are capable of confronting the challenges associated with higher-level education in a foreign language; consequently, many forms of proficiency exams exist, and are in active use variably throughout the English-speaking world. For the purpose of this focused paper, I will concentrate my assessment and critique on the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet Based Test (TOEFL iBT) as it is the proficiency exam I am most familiar with; specifically I will review the Reading section of the exam. To accomplish this completely, it would be necessary to evaluate the exam based on the many standards for assessment evaluation including, reliability, authenticity, practicality, validity, and washback. As I intend this paper to be concise, and this section of the TOEFL iBT is rather extensive, I will be unable to center my analysis on all five of the previously mentioned standards. Instead, I will compromise with an effective triangulation focusing on three of, in my opinion, the most applicable standards to this section of the exam: authenticity, predictive validity, and washback.
Case Study: Differentiation in a Diverse Classroom, 2015
This paper will give a detailed explanation of the adult language classroom that I have been obse... more This paper will give a detailed explanation of the adult language classroom that I have been observing and teaching in for the past two months in Eureka, California. In the first part of this paper, I will document the context of this classroom, the students, their particular learning levels, the cultural factors at play, and other pertinent information to explaining the intense diversity of this classroom. I will then argue that this class’s large amount of academic diversity requires appropriately differentiated instructions, classwork, and activities for the different leveled students to be as successful as possible. Subsequently, I will propose a solution involving the use of language centers for half the class time where the advanced students could work independently, with other modalities (i.e. computers, books, audio), and in groups/pairs to encourage a more active role in their own learning. I will argue, furthermore, that this solution will not only give the instructor more time to spend with the beginner students in the class, but will also promote learner autonomy with the more advanced students. Finally, I will detail my expert consultant’s responses to this proposed solution, and follow with a closing statement of the most important things I have learned from this Case Study.
This paper diligently explains an ethnographic study I performed at Humboldt State University’s (... more This paper diligently explains an ethnographic study I performed at Humboldt State University’s (HSU) International English Language Institute (IELI) in Arcata, California during the spring of 2015. This paper includes a description of the ethnography’s purpose, theoretical focus, focal student and his academic environment, as well as, the methodology I used to obtain my data, and the limitations to information gathering that I encountered. In addition, this paper includes an analysis from a sociolinguistic perspective on the effect of the focal student’s motivation and identity on his English language acquisition (ELA). Furthermore, I have included a summary of my conclusions from this data as well as my personal recommendations for the focal student’s continued academic success. I conclude with a personal reflection about the experience of doing this ethnography including what I learned, how my skills improved, and how these types of intercultural exchanges can help create a world of better-prepared students, and more informed teachers.
To Boldly Go - An Analysis of Split Infinitives, 2016
“…to boldly go where no one has gone before.” –Star Trek
This paper will attempt to investigate ... more “…to boldly go where no one has gone before.” –Star Trek
This paper will attempt to investigate the use of the prescriptive English grammar rule that likes to persistently insist that the italicized words I just typed are not a correct usage of grammar. To accomplish this I will first investigate and detail the opinions of three English grammar sources on the rule of split infinitives. These sources will include the Oxford Guide to English Grammar by John Eastwood (1994, 2002), the Microsoft Word Grammar Check standard throughout the (American) English-speaking world, and the writings of Oliver Kamm, a British linguist and writer of the weekly Times column “The Pendant”; a column that is notorious for its non-prescriptivist tendencies. I am choosing such diverse perspectives on grammar rules deliberately to help discover more about the debate over this rule.
Furthermore, I will be using the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, and the British National Corpus to do a series of searches across contemporary, spoken, American, British, and academic language sets. These searches will consist of simple two-part split infinitive phrases, the preposition to with a range of adverbs, plus a common verb. For example: [to usually] + [want], [to really] + [need], [to luckily] + [verb], [to barely] + [verb]. From the search results I will descriptively analyze where this prescriptive grammar rule is still being observed and by whom. Finally, I will provide a brief analysis of why I think I obtained the results I did and how they might affect my own teaching practice.
Keywords: prescriptivism, descriptivism, infinitive, corpus
This paper will explore the linguistic differences between the Spanish and English languages whil... more This paper will explore the linguistic differences between the Spanish and English languages while highlighting the effects these differences have on English language learners (ELLs) whose first language is Spanish. As a fluent Spanish speaker and teacher in California, and a native English speaker and teacher in Peru, I will use my in-depth personal knowledge and teaching experiences with these languages to guide this research and to help identify key learner challenges. I will argue that Spanish speaking ELLs carry an advantage over adult speakers of many other languages in that the academic writing of English consists largely of Latin cognates with Spanish, thus making the process of learning words like “transportation” (transportación), analyze (analizar), or “process” (proceso), that much easier. Conversely, many Spanish speaking ELLs have extreme difficulty learning many of the basic words in English, especially the irregular verbs that come largely from English’s Germanic past. Based on these premises I will argue for a two-pronged approach for teachers with Spanish speaking ELLs: Teachers with older students should use the students’ in-depth knowledge of Latin cognates to develop academic vocabulary while simultaneously helping students discover the historical reasons behind the irregular verbs and non-cognate words that exist in English. Teachers with younger students should help them learn the irregular verbs and non-cognates through memorization and social interaction coupled with a cursory overview of a few basic cognates specifically highlighting the sound of the words rather than their technical history.
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Papers by Kyle Beattie
Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research
supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices,
supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing.
Keywords Plagiarism scoring rubric · Academic writing · Plagiarism severity calculation · Ethics of scholarships · English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
Keywords: TOEFL, assessment, authenticity, predictive validity, washback
Keywords: differentiation, learner autonomy
Keywords: ethnography, motivation, identity, Discourse, ELA, sociolinguistics
This paper will attempt to investigate the use of the prescriptive English grammar rule that likes to persistently insist that the italicized words I just typed are not a correct usage of grammar. To accomplish this I will first investigate and detail the opinions of three English grammar sources on the rule of split infinitives. These sources will include the Oxford Guide to English Grammar by John Eastwood (1994, 2002), the Microsoft Word Grammar Check standard throughout the (American) English-speaking world, and the writings of Oliver Kamm, a British linguist and writer of the weekly Times column “The Pendant”; a column that is notorious for its non-prescriptivist tendencies. I am choosing such diverse perspectives on grammar rules deliberately to help discover more about the debate over this rule.
Furthermore, I will be using the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, and the British National Corpus to do a series of searches across contemporary, spoken, American, British, and academic language sets. These searches will consist of simple two-part split infinitive phrases, the preposition to with a range of adverbs, plus a common verb. For example: [to usually] + [want], [to really] + [need], [to luckily] + [verb], [to barely] + [verb]. From the search results I will descriptively analyze where this prescriptive grammar rule is still being observed and by whom. Finally, I will provide a brief analysis of why I think I obtained the results I did and how they might affect my own teaching practice.
Keywords: prescriptivism, descriptivism, infinitive, corpus
Keywords: cognate, etymology, vocabulary
Developing a Comprehensive Plagiarism Assessment Rubric: Defining “plagiarism” is not simple, and its complexity is too seldom appreciated. This article offers a comprehensive plagiarism assessment rubric from a four-year study of analyzing students’ plagiarism. From qualitative analyses of 120 students’ paraphrase samples, we identified seven plagiarism dimensions and employed a five-point Likert-scale to rank each dimension’s severity. Then, we enlisted editors, reviewers, and research
supervisors to refine the severity of the plagiarism dimensions to articulate a plagiarism spectrum. We produced a Plagiarism Scoring Rubric to categorize 127 plagiarism combinations out of the seven plagiarism dimensions’ composites. Finally, we described how the Plagiarism Scoring Rubric, accompanied by the severity indices,
supports instructors in scoring students’ plagiarism and enables students to understand proper crediting of prior work better when citing and paraphrasing.
Keywords Plagiarism scoring rubric · Academic writing · Plagiarism severity calculation · Ethics of scholarships · English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
Keywords: TOEFL, assessment, authenticity, predictive validity, washback
Keywords: differentiation, learner autonomy
Keywords: ethnography, motivation, identity, Discourse, ELA, sociolinguistics
This paper will attempt to investigate the use of the prescriptive English grammar rule that likes to persistently insist that the italicized words I just typed are not a correct usage of grammar. To accomplish this I will first investigate and detail the opinions of three English grammar sources on the rule of split infinitives. These sources will include the Oxford Guide to English Grammar by John Eastwood (1994, 2002), the Microsoft Word Grammar Check standard throughout the (American) English-speaking world, and the writings of Oliver Kamm, a British linguist and writer of the weekly Times column “The Pendant”; a column that is notorious for its non-prescriptivist tendencies. I am choosing such diverse perspectives on grammar rules deliberately to help discover more about the debate over this rule.
Furthermore, I will be using the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, and the British National Corpus to do a series of searches across contemporary, spoken, American, British, and academic language sets. These searches will consist of simple two-part split infinitive phrases, the preposition to with a range of adverbs, plus a common verb. For example: [to usually] + [want], [to really] + [need], [to luckily] + [verb], [to barely] + [verb]. From the search results I will descriptively analyze where this prescriptive grammar rule is still being observed and by whom. Finally, I will provide a brief analysis of why I think I obtained the results I did and how they might affect my own teaching practice.
Keywords: prescriptivism, descriptivism, infinitive, corpus
Keywords: cognate, etymology, vocabulary