No discussion of the processes of finding and using information associated with the production of independent learning assignments would be complete without at least some coverage of what can be done by the educator to limit student plagiarism. At its simplest, plagiarism may be deemed the appropriation of someone else's work and passing it off as one's own. The unoriginal material may form only a small part of the individual's assignment or constitute the whole document. It will become apparent that, although it is often equated with the modern ‘copy and paste’ mentality, the term actually encompasses various forms of scholarly malpractice. Plagiarism is not merely a worrying feature of the way in which young people use information; it is also one of the greatest challenges currently facing education and scholarship today. The high-profile controversies surrounding broadcaster Raj Persaud and Tony Antoniou at Durham University around 12 years ago illustrate that it can affect even the highest levels of academia. There is a tendency to associate plagiarism with the extensive use of the internet that we see today but the problem is, in fact, much more long-standing. As far back as the mid-1970s, Lindsay (1976, 19) recognised the need for his ‘information training’ course at South Hackney School to counter the common inclination of young people simply to grab the first book they saw and copy from it. Just a few years later, Cole and Gardner (1979, 189) were dismayed by ‘the amount of copying or near copying’ that was evident when they conducted their investigation into project work undertaken by students in their first year of secondary school. Typically, plagiarism in the era in which Cole and Gardner were writing involved either copying material from a book or copying the work of a course colleague tackling the same assignment.

There can be no doubt that plagiarism is considerably more prevalent now. Information has become much easier to access and, crucially, the gap between the processes of finding material and then using it in an academic assignment has been narrowed as a result of the ability of the individual to execute all the inherent tasks at one computer workstation.