Plagiarism on the college campus
A UX research report on studying college students’ understanding of academic dishonesty and plagiarism.
Project Introduction
Our team as two UX researchers of a fictitious company called “ED Think” is going to “develop” a Chrome extension on Plagiarism for graduate students at NYU’s Steinhardt. We would like to know more about this problem and our potential users through a means of User research methods in order to build a clear picture of the problem we are going to solve before moving to the design stage.
Role
UX researcher
Teammate
UX researcher: Viktoriia Zykina
Tools used
Survey, interview, Affinity map
Timeline
Sept. 2020 - Oct. 2020, class project
Problem and user statement
Main problem:
Plagiarism is a major issue for students and researchers all across majors in college and academia that can cause serious consequences. While the definition and rules of plagiarism are complicated, students get stressed in understanding and actionalizing it.
Main audience:
NYU’s graduate students who are not very familiar with writing academic papers.
Outcome:
A Google Chrome extension that helps graduate students at NYU to avoid plagiarism while writing academic papers.
Design process
Share our UX research methods, results, and findings that we have done in the first diamond -"design the right thing"
Moving into the next phase of the Double Diamond Diagram - "design things right".
We will need some support from stakeholders to start creating, designing and testing our product.
Research methodology
Survey
Surveys play an important part in understanding and defining the problem.
It helped us get more insights because we were able to get more people's answers and opinions compared to the interviews.
A total of 17 questions in our survey was conducted; We have received 22 responses so far.
To get more responses we posted the link on Slack and sent direct messages to students.
Interview
We have interviewed three Steinhardt's graduate students.
Each of us has switched from being interviewer to note-taker.
Each interview took around 30 to 40 minutes.
Questions ranging from their definition and experiences with campus plagiarism, tools they’ve used to avoid plagiarism
Affinity mapping
Through interviews, we have a deeper understanding on what problems students encounter and are most struggling with.
While conducting interviews, we took notes in Google Doc and then organized all the ideas in Affinity Map.
That helped us narrow down topics we need to focus on (such as paraphrasing and citations).
While conducting interviews and survey, we have been updating our Affinity Map, to help us organize our notes, brainstorm more ideas, and see what is more important and what is less.
Problem statement/”How Might We?”
Point Of Views
[USER] NYU graduate students who do not have a lot of experience writing academic papers [NEED TO] Save time on writing papers on creating citations quickly and accurately [BECAUSE] citations formats are complicated and hard to remember.
"How Might We" statements
How might we educate students on how citations work?
How might we help students to save time while creating citations?
How might we help students to check if they cite correctly?
How might we help students to cite correctly without recalling rules for each citation format?
How might we help students to keep track of citations?
How might we help to promote students’ awareness of citations?
Jobs To Be Done
Try to help students to save time while writing an academic paper.
Try to help students stay out of intentional or unintentional plagiarism.
Try to help students to make sure they do not lose points in citation formatting or being speculated for plagiarism.
Help students do the most boring and tedious part of writing a paper, citation.
Help students to be more competent writers and researchers.
Personae
"My Cognitive Science professor told me to take a look at APA format which I had no clue about it at all. I tried to ask the professor and some peers for help, but it's taking a long time to go back and forth because we are in different time zones. I am trying to learn APA from start on Purdue Owl but this is too complicated for me to master. This citation formatting issue is driving me crazy. I really want something that can help me with citation and I don't want to lose points again." -Justin
"[Paraphrasing] is usually not challenging for me because I am pretty good at summarizing ideas, but sometimes I have trouble paraphrasing if I am not entirely clear about what the original author is saying or if the author has already summarized their idea in a way that I do not feel I could restate in my own words." - Ellie
Insights from user research
There are several reasons participants think why plagiarism happens according to our research:
Lack of knowledge and awareness of plagiarism
Poor time management skills or being lazy
Lack of the ability to rewrite the ideas in their own words
Lack of knowledge or education in proper citations
More than 70% of participants find paraphrasing is challenging, or somehow challenging, mostly international students but also some domestic students.
"Mostly because I need to think [of] different vocabulary and structure of the sentence." - Participant A
“You also don't want to misrepresent something. by reshaping someone else's direct words into your own, you can alter the meaning, sometimes so much that it is the opposite or completely different from the original meaning. this is academically dishonest and I would never want to be that." - Participant B
“Some phrasings are just too perfect on their own." - Participant C
Future work
Limitations:
Small interview and survey sampling pool: expertise levels, number of interviewees and survey participants.
Limited survey question topics.
Limited academic research on exploring the topic.
Moving to the second diamond phase:
Sketching
Prototyping
Iteration
Usability
Visual design
