Reducing Plagiarism Rate with a Game-Based Training (GBT)

Abstract — As game playing is widely recognized as enjoyment, passionate involvement,

motivation, satisfaction creativity, and social interaction, a Game-Based Training Program

specially designed with educational purposes to be used in training specific subject and to teach a

skill is considered an effective way to reduce plagiarism rate among research students’ work.

This article reveals the results of an ongoing research project on the implementation of the game-

based training designed to make the implicit understandings on plagiarism to be explicit among

postgraduate students. In this article, the analysis of types and degrees of plagiarism found in

theses in four Thai research universities were obtained through plagiarism detecting software as

well as manual techniques. In addition, 48 postgraduate students (24 PhDs and 24 MAs) were

recruited on voluntary basis. The results illustrated that the most frequency of plagiarism

performed by MDs and PhDs is Clone, which is copying the entire context of one’s own without

changing or giving a credit to the author, according to Turnitin’s spectrum. Moreover, types of

plagiarism were identified by their frequency. This study could shade light on firstly ways to

engage postgraduate students in such training through explicit scenarios to create understanding

in plagiarism problems from interaction educational games. It secondly was clear that learners’

motivation and involvement in the learning throughout the training was essential. Finally, the

training should allow them to win and to lose in the games in order to encourage the construction

of knowledge and understanding in the nature of plagiarism.

Keywords— Academic writing, Plagiarism, Articles, Publication, English language