{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026272577996715927, 'fraction_numerical': 0.013136288998357963, 'mean_word_length': 5.154882154882155, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Helping Students Improve Citation Performance

DURING MY FINAL YEAR in graduate school, I began teaching business communication. Without much forethought, I asked students to write a report with a sources requirement. When students turned their reports in, I learned that we were worlds apart on the practice of citing such sources. As a student in a rarefied academic environment, I wrote with proper citations. My students did not. I spent classroom time discussing citation practice. Their performance did not improve. In this article, I describe an approach to citing sources in a business context that has improved students’ performance. Students have long struggled with citation (Moeck, 2002; Wilhoit, 1994), and the causes of their poor performance are uncertain. The ESL literature does suggest one cause: Students from some cultures find the concept of intellectual property immoral, so for that small subset there is an explanation for poor citation practice (Thompson & Williams, 1995). But studies of U.S.-born students show that a large number of individual and contextual factors may be implicated (McCabe, 1992; McCabe, Treviño, & Butterfield, 2001). Students continue to feign ignorance or deflect criticism onto others, even after prior instruction has been documented. My approach to the performance problem has been to assume that business writing is different from academic writing and that if those differences are fully embraced, one may find new motivations to cite and different formatting requirements. The idea stemmed from my experience with students who came to business communication thinking they could not write well (as evidenced by their reflections in the self-assessment memo assignment in Locker, 2003) but who found they could write better and more confidently when they had definite tasks