Does The Internet Have An Effect On Student Research?

Some Professors And Education Specialists Think So

By Shannon Hicks

Years ago, the term “paper mill” was something of a slang term that was used to describe the factories that turned out rolls and reams of paper.

Today the term has an entirely different meaning.

A panel discussion hosted by Western CT State University in March presented a number of speakers who all presented different looks at a frightening point: The Internet is damaging the research skills of a large percentage of today’s students, whether they are youngsters in middle school, college students, graduate students, or even adults in continuing education courses.

The speakers who participated in “The Promise And the Reality: How the Internet Is Changing Student Research,” a program sponsored by the WCSU Libraries and Media Services and Library Policy Committee, all seemed to agree that the Internet, and its easy access to vast amounts of information as well as to sites offering research-papers-for-purchase, is the new version of a paper mill.

In years past, the familiar soft cover books with the yellow covers called “Cliffs Notes” were some students’ best friends. A quick visit to a local bookstore for a Cliffs Notes version of a popular novel, and a student could, for a few dollars and a quick read, have a working understanding of a book’s characters and plot lines.

Students who were even bolder went a step further, locating underground sources and actually purchasing a fully completed research paper or book report that could be turned in with their own name on it.

The days of shuffling through old-fashioned card catalogs at libraries, jotting the titles and Dewey decimal numbers of any number of books, are long gone; many public and school libraries switched over to computerized card catalog programs years ago.

But the days of lugging piles of encyclopedias, atlases, magazines, and other reference materials to a library table already littered with notebooks and piles of paper with carefully composed outlines alongside hastily scribbled notes may soon become a thing of the past as well.

Today, thanks to the growing popularity of the Internet and an increasing number of sites, students can do the research for a full paper in one sitting – by visiting one or more sites on the World Wide Web – and can even purchase term papers as easily as they can buy books, CDs, and videos from popular sites like Amazon.com.

Students can visit sites that were designed especially with the desperate student in mind. There are sites where popularly assigned books have been broken down chapter by chapter, offering summaries and character analysis. It’s the online version of Cliffs Notes. Other sites offer full papers, already written. Pick your topic, find a price within your budget, and the paper is yours.

Because of this, the research skills of students at all levels of education are suffering. The ease with which students can point, cut, and paste papers together is also causing concern among their teachers. These were among the points discussed during the WestConn symposium.

“Students’ research skills, especially in the past five years – the same time period that we have seen the popularity of the Internet just explode – has been getting poorer and poorer and poorer,” said Dr Jean Kreizinger, a teacher in WCSU’s biology department. Dr Kreizinger called today’s students “The Hunt and Click Generation.”

“The quality of the work being turned in by too many of today’s students is not what I would like to be seeing,” Dr Kreizinger said. While she was not one of the panelists for the WestConn program, she and fellow faculty members continued the discussion among themselves long after the program wrapped up.

Among those who were invited to speak on stage at the Student Center was Dr William Petkanas, a professor in the education and educational psychology department at WestConn. Dr Petkanas was quick to point out that the Internet has its advantages and its disadvantages. The amount of information available to students searching the World Wide Web is tremendous, Prof Petkanas said.

“Students have access to a good reference library,” he said. “But they can quickly become overwhelmed by all that information.

“While it’s easy to access information, it can also be very overwhelming. It’s a very confusing thing to find out how much information is out there in the world,” he continued. His first point segued very easily into his second: With all that information available literally at one’s fingertips, all viewpoints on nearly any subject in the world are represented.

“There are no editors, no vetting... There is a lot of just plan wrong stuff out there,” he said. Librarians today are faced with the new task of helping students learn to differentiate between what Professor Petkanas called “crackpot and simple opinions” and true, hard facts.

“It’s very easy for almost anyone to look as reliable as CNN with a good presentation,” he warned.

Another problem with using the Internet as a resource for papers is that some of the documents, or sites, eventually disappear. Professor Petkanas addressed that subject as well.

“Your sources are not always going to be there for the next person,” the instructor said. “As an academic, I tend to think a reference should be something carved in stone. It should be something anyone can go back and look at on paper at any time.”

The morality of copying work directly from an Internet site isn’t the only thing at issue, the speakers pointed out. While plagiarism has always been frowned upon by the academic community, and even punished at times by universities and colleges when it has been proven, copying work from the Internet can create more than a guilty conscience for a student. Using work directly off the Internet can also create legal issues.

Arlene Bielefield is a professor in the School of Communication, Information and Library Science at Southern CT State University. She has done extensive research and published numerous articles on the subject of copyright laws, licenses, and the legal issues that affect students and their research.

“First of all,” Prof Bielefield said, “the copyright laws are federal. There are no state-level copyright laws. And this applies to materials found on the Internet to the same extent as it applies to information in its traditional formats.

“I think people are confused about that,” she said. Copyrighted work is anything that is found in its original form, in any tangible form of communication. E-mail is copyrighted work.

Unfortunately, Prof Bielefield went on to point out, copyright laws do allow for students to exercise what is seen as “fair use.” The copying of information by students, in some cases, and without an author’s permission, is allowed under copyright laws provided the use of said information is for the purpose of scholarship and research. Such use must be credited to the information’s original author, however; it cannot be passed off as a student’s own work.

“Plagiarism is a very ugly topic,” Dr Janet Burke agreed. Dr Burke, a professor in WestConn’s education and educational psychology department, said it is becoming increasingly difficult for teachers to get students to turn in original work.

“The problem is increasing throughout the world,” she said, citing a recent case in which students at Yale University in New Haven admitted, on private questionnaires, that they had plagiarized portions or full papers.

“It’s not fair for the student who has done original work to receive a lower grade than a student who has plagiarized a paper,” Dr Burke said. It’s so easy and attractive, she said, for students who are behind schedule to copy and paste information into their own files.

Plagiarize – the act of stealing and using the ideas or writings of another as one’s own – and plagiarism are both offspring from the word “plagiary.” Its Latin root is plagiarius, and the word was originally used in the English language to describe a kidnapper or a kidnapping.

“There is nothing more precious to a writer than his or her original word,” said Dr Burke. “The emotional impact of learning that someone has stolen those words is like walking into your home and finding a precious heirloom stolen.”

The good news is, not every one of today’s students has fallen victim to the wiles of the Internet. While one speaker suggested that students need to be taught good Internet etiquette and usage – including how to separate hard fact from opinion – continually from the middle school grades, which is when most students are being introduced to the World Wide Web, one college student has managed to remain true to her research learnings.

WestConn freshman Rene Cartagena was in the audience at the “Internet and Student Research” program, and she not only agreed with one of the speakers, but probably also appeased some of their worries.

“Plagiarism hurts me,” she told the panel, “I’m getting Bs and Cs when others are getting As, and we know some of those A-students aren’t fairly earning those grades.

“I have my morals, though,” continued the communications major. “I can’t imagine plagiarizing or purchasing a paper. Ever. Honestly, I wouldn’t even know where to go to buy a paper... and I don’t want to know.”