Passage-level textual comparison · complete listing · 3 August 2026
Purpose: A complete, passage-level comparison of Jason Arday's 2015 Liverpool John Moores PhD thesis (An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers…) against Paula Zwozdiak-Myers' 2009 Brunel PhD thesis (An analysis of the concept reflective practice…).
Matching was automated (exact word-run detection at ≥10 words, plus sentence-level fuzzy matching); every match is listed below with the surrounding text of both theses and the page number of each.
This document records textual correspondence, its direction and its arrangement. Judgements about what the correspondence means belong to the awarding institutions and to the reader.
Page Numbers: Every entry below references a page in each thesis. Both theses are public documents (LJMU repository; Brunel BURA handle 2438/4316).
However, the matching was done in software, which required converting PDF to text. Page numbers are not guaranteed to be correct.
Recommendation: open both PDFs to the stated pages and compare. For ZM, printed page N is approximately PDF page N+11. Quotations here come from the PDFs' extracted text with mechanical repairs only (ligatures, line-break hyphenation); line breaks are not preserved, words are.
The JA thesis incorporates material from the ZM thesis without attribution, as noted by other commentators. This document adds four findings to that record.
The matched material follows ZM's order. Across five of the seven chapters, the passages matched to ZM appear in JA in the same sequence as in hers — chapter to chapter and page by page (Kendall's τ = 1.00, 0.95, 1.00, 0.85 and 0.93 for Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6; see §1). Textual overlap between these theses has been reported by Cofnas and others, but the order-preservation measurement appears to be new.
Both texts share the same copy-editing errors. Six anomalies are shared, including "McTaggert" for McTaggart in the same sentence about the same claim, although both authors spell the name correctly elsewhere.
There is a suspicious treatment of a list. ZM reports findings as "…improvement in three main areas:" followed by three items. JA reports findings as "…improvement in five main areas:" followed by the identical three items from ZM.
A pinpoint citation changes both year and page. ZM cites "(Gray, 2004: 377)". JA cites "(Gray, 2010: 347)", a different author's seven-page editorial. The 2010 article has been obtained and word-searched: it supports none of the three propositions the thesis attributes to it (see §3.4).
The following diagram provides a shot of the matched material across the documents. Each point is one matched passage, placed by its position in JA's thesis (horizontal) and in ZM's thesis (vertical). Points forming a rising diagonal mean the matched material appears in both documents in the same order. Click any point to jump to its entry.
Order preservation, quantified: Kendall's τ over one point per matched paragraph. τ = +1.00 means the borrowed material appears in exactly the source's order; a paragraph with several matched sentences counts once.
Two theses (within the same field) share no genre convention that orders their pages against each other, so values near +1 across whole chapters cannot arise from both simply following a standard thesis structure. Chapter 3 and the mentoring-themed sections of Chapter 2 (§2.8–2.11) contain essentially no material matched to ZM..
JA's text left, ZM's right.
Strong highlight: words inside exact shared runs.
Light highlight : sentences matched by the fuzzy pass (rewording of the same sentence).
Unhighlighted text is context. Entries follow JA's page order.
A close look at the titles of chapters reveals an oddity:
"Chapter 4: Research methodology and design of this study" …
"Chapter 6: Discussion and implications of research findings"
"Chapter 4: Methodology for Research Study" …
"Chapter 6: Discussion"
"Chapter 4: Research methodology and design of this study" (her Ch1 overview; contents p.100: "…design of study") …
"Chapter 6: Discussion and implications of research findings"
The roadmap chapter titles that JA uses in Chapter 1 are the same as ZM's chapter titles, but the actual chapter titles in JA are different.
Comparing every numbered section heading in both contents pages (151 in JA against 92 in ZM), six of JA's section headings are ZM's verbatim:
| JA | Heading | ZM |
|---|---|---|
| 1.2 | Purpose of the thesis | 1.3 |
| 1.6 | Structure of the thesis | 1.4 |
| 2.6 | Reflective practice underpins the development of forms of knowledge that serve particular interests | 2.5 |
| 2.7 | Reflective practice as an integral part of Action Research | 2.8 |
| 2.12 | Moving toward Autonomy — including the American "toward" | 2.9.2 |
| 7.4 | Limitations of the study | 6.4 |
| 7.3 | Suggestions for further research (near-verbatim: ZM has "Recommendations for further research") | 6.5 |
The list has three items in both.
| Detail | Where (JA / ZM) |
|---|---|
| "Britzman 1991" — the one missing comma in an otherwise consistently punctuated citation string (in JA it spans the p.17/18 page break) | pp.17–18 / p.1 |
| "Boud" listed first — the single alphabetisation inversion in her otherwise ordered list, preserved in the same slot although the adjacent entry differs | p.17 / p.1 |
| "the student teachers'" — ungrammatical apostrophe, same positions | pp.65, 343 / pp.47, 268 |
| "Grimmett et al," — comma for period after "et al" | p.65 / p.47 |
| "McTaggert" for McTaggart — same sentence, same citation; both spell it correctly elsewhere | p.53 / p.45 |
| "review of literature" — nonstandard, missing article | p.79 / p.80 |
Gray (2004) is David Gray's research-methods textbook. Gray (2010) is a seven-page journal editorial by Donald S. Gray. The full 2010 article has been obtained and word-searched: the quoted phrase does not appear in it; "other people" does not appear in it; the word "mentor" — attributed to it twice more at JA p.18 — appears zero times. None of the three propositions the thesis attributes to Gray (2010) is supported by its text, and a full scan finds no wording from it anywhere in the thesis.
Where her citation strings are reproduced, entries change in patterned ways. For instance, several substitutions share the initial letter of the entry they replace, at the same position in the list:
| JA page | Alteration |
|---|---|
| p.17 | Borko and Putnam 1996 → Berlak and Berlak 1981; Moore 2000 → Maynard 2001; Taylor 1997 → Tabachnick and Zeichner 1991; Knight 2002 dropped |
| p.53 | Noffke and Zeichner 1987 inserted; Waxman et al. 1988 dropped |
| pp.62–63 | Gray, 2004: 377 → Gray, 2010: 347; McKernan 1991 inserted |
| p.63 | Noffke 1994 and Noordhoff and Kleinfeld 1990 dropped |
| pp.65–66 | Palmer 1998 → Pollard 2011; Rodgers et al. 2006 → Raider-Roth et al. 2012 |
| pp.18, 59, 63 | Citations (Moyles/Pring/Pollard; Bradbury/Ghaye; Hickson) attached to sentences she wrote as her own unattributed prose |
In at least nine passages, ZM's direct quotations (with page-precise citation) appear in JA's text with the quotation marks removed and the page-precise citation kept. Thus JA contains a reference to an exact page of a source that is no longer being quoted. Affected: Grimmett (p.53), Moon 1999: 14 (p.58), Carr and Kemmis 1986: 157 (p.59), McKernan / Elliott / Gore and Zeichner (p.62), Kemmis and McTaggart / Gray (pp.62–63), Usher 1998: 18 (p.65), Boud et al. 1985: 19 and Boud 1999: 125 (pp.66–67), and the Grimmett block quotation (p.65). Each is visible in the corresponding entry above.
ZM's thesis organises its findings around numbered "dimensions of reflective practice" with internal cross-references ("(see section 2.7)"). Where her sentences appear in JA's text, the dimension markers, ordinal rankings and cross-references are absent, while the surrounding wording remains (entries in Chapters 5–6 above). One list loses an item: ZM's four-stage account of Boud et al. (association, integration, validation, appropriation) appears at his pp.66–67 with "integration" absent — three bullets where the source has four.
Consider in-text citations whose author appears nowhere in the bibliography. (Common errors of omission). Measured identically for both theses after filtering extraction artifacts and misspellings:
JA ≈ 40 of 623 in-text citations (≈6.4%);
ZM ≈ 5 of 347 (≈1.4%).
The unmatched citations in his thesis cluster where the matched material is (e.g. Usher 1998, her pinpoint quotation at his p.65, has no reference-list entry).
As mentioned above, one chapter of the JA thesis contains no material from the ZM thesis. However, scans against three further sources found localised material in that chapter. This issue is beyond the scope of this document.
Matching.
Exact: maximal shared word-runs, seeded at 8-gram, reported at ≥10 words, over lowercase alphanumeric tokens with UK/US spelling folded for matching only.
Fuzzy: sentence-level matching via rare-token indexing, scored by Jaccard and containment (thresholds 0.35/0.50). Display highlighting inside each entry re-aligns the two passages at ≥5-word shared runs, so short verbatim fragments inside reworded sentences are also marked.
Pages. JA's PDF prints page numbers as footers; ZM's as headers. Positions were mapped accordingly and spot-verified against page images (pp.17, 264 both sides among others). Her printed page N ≈ PDF page N+11. Don't rely on them, though, errors may be present.