Can Turnitin come to the rescue: From teachers’ reflections?

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative critical action research of six Grade 12 high school teachers who used Turnitin as part of their assessment processes. Turnitin submissions, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, observation and reflective activities were used for data production/generation. This article concluded that although Turnitin did not help teachers to prevent all learner acts of plagiarism, it did scare the learners away from any obvious act of plagiarism. Teachers and learners became aware of technology as the ‘servant’, not the ‘master’. Grounded analysis was used to generate two themes for this study. This study tried to explore the teachers’ reflections of Turnitin used in assessing their learners’ work. Purposive sampling was used in selecting the only six Grade 12 teachers who used Turnitin at a school in Durban. This article consequently recommends the use of ‘Assessment, Educating to avoid and Turnitin’ framework in any integration of hard-ware/soft-ware (HW/SW) resources.

Keywords: assessment; awareness; curriculum; digital technology; habit; Turnitin