Digital plagiarism: An experimental study of the effect of instructional goals and copy-and-paste affordance

•How copy-and-paste function impacted digital plagiarism was examined in real time.•No impact of instructional achievement goals or the copy-and-paste function alone.•Performance-goal students plagiarized more when copy-and-paste was available.

This paper presents an empirical study of digital plagiarism. Under two experimental conditions, undergraduate writers were guided by different achievement goals to write an essay with or without the copy-and-paste function on a website. The study focused on two possible influences on digital plagiarism, a) instructional goals for writing, and b) the affordances of digital learning environments specifically the availability of a copy-paste function. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used to analyze the effects of these contextual variables on digital plagiarism. Results indicated that overall 79.5% of the writers engaged in digital plagiarism. There was a significant interaction in which instructional performance goals lead to more plagiarism when copy-paste is available. Findings highlight individual-environment interactions, including a writer's adopted goals for writing as set by writing prompt instructions (learning goals vs. performance goals) and the affordances of the writing environment including the ease of copy-paste or precautions taken to protect text (such as using jpegs of text). Rather than being principally directed by student's beliefs prior to, or when they begin a writing task, the on-the-fly interactions they have during the writing task may best explain their tendency toward plagiarism.