Investigating the use of educational intervention to reduce plagiarism act in ESL undergraduates academic writing

One of the plagiarism acts that commonly occur among undergraduates is the unintentional plagiarism. This could happen due to their lack of knowledge on how to write references correctly. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using the Educational Intervention (EI) (Smedley et al., 2015) to reduce plagiarism act among ESL undergraduates (70 undergraduates) taking the PPU 6022 Academic Writing course at one of the private institutions in Perak. In this study, quasi- experimental design was used to gather the quantitative data by using the Avoiding Plagiarism Test (APT) and collection of exercises and assignments. Meanwhile focus group interview was used to collect the qualitative data. The result of one way ANOVA for the post-tests between the experimental group and the control group are (F(1,68)=10.593, p=.002) for writing in-text citation, (F(1,68)=21.975, p=.000) for paraphrasing and (F(1,68)= 8.011, p =.006) for writing a reference list using APA style. The analysis showed that the improvements of the experimental group was higher and significantly different to the control group. Meanwhile, the results of the repeated measures ANOVA for the gathered exercises and assignments of the experimental group are (F(2,68)=1.139, p=.326) for writing in-text citation, (F(2,68)=48.561, p=.000) for paraphrasing and (F(2,68)=.729, p=.486) for writing a reference list using APA style. This showed that the participants in the experimental group demonstrated improvements in their referencing skills however the improvements were not statistically significant except for paraphrasing. Besides, the analysis of focus group interview reported positive response towards the use of EI in improving their referencing skills. Overall, it can be concluded that the intervention was effective in improving ESL undergraduates’ referencing skills however it can be improved to achieve its optimum capability. This is an important study as it offers an initiative to combat plagiarism acts amongst undergraduates at tertiary education.