Viewpoint: Applying an Employee-Motivation Model to Prevent Student Plagiarism

A new, management-oriented model for the prevention of student plagiarism is described. The model, which was derived from Vroom's expectancy theory of employee motivation, postulates that instructors can best prevent plagiarism by ensuring that students (a) understand the rules of ethical writing, (b) expect the writing assignment to be manageable, (c) expect ethical writing to lead to personally important benefits, (d) expect plagiarizing to be difficult, and (e) expect plagiarizing to lead to personally important costs. Included are descriptions of many specific strategies for each part of the model.