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, Trevino, & Butterfield, 2001). Students continue to feign ignorance or deflect criticism onto others, even after prior instruction has been documented.