Active engagement with course readings is essential to student academic success. Deep reading helps students comprehend the materials and retain them longer. Yet, getting students to complete the class reading is a well-known challenge to many instructors in higher education [1]. Several studies have shown that although pre-class reading is important for student learning, yet 60–80% of students do not read the textbook before coming to class [3]. And with the shift to online instruction and the ongoing stress of the pandemic, it became harder still for instructors to ensure that all students keep up with the material they need.
Weekly Ed-Tech Spotlight:
iClicker Cloud, which is available to all LSA faculty and students, now has a way to poll or query your students during asynchronous work like lecture videos or readings. This feature is called Assignments. Take a look at the How To page or How To video!
Some strategies that have proven to be effective in helping students become more involved with the assigned readings, include reading quizzes, discussion questions for each reading that ask students to apply or practice the concepts in the reading, and short writing assignments that do likewise [2, 4]. Using annotation tools is another very effective strategy that enables students to process the information they read more deeply and increase their critical thinking and comprehension. Social reading or social annotation tools such as Perusall and Hypothesis allow students to collaboratively annotate text online and discuss the course readings with their classmates [3]. They offer a useful way to extend the traditional class discussion around the reading, or even shift it to asynchronous and self-paced activity online without sacrificing student-to-student communication.
Some of the specific benefits of using collaborative annotation assignments with the course readings include:
Improved student engagement & performance. Social or collaborative annotation enables students to add comments on the reading and to respond to other students’ comments. An annotation assignment will not only encourage students to complete the reading, it will allow them to engage in peer-instruction and pool their understanding. Such knowledge sharing is known to result in deeper understanding. Research has found that collaborative annotation is associated with increased student reading time per week and better exam grades [3]. The same study reveals that, most students completed their reading assignments before class which is particularly essential in flipped or reading-intensive courses.
Increased collaboration & sense of community. Engaging with other students’ voices and understanding of the material fosters a stronger sense of community. It can even increase interactions between students outside class [3, 5].
Perusall, a popular collaborative annotation tool, is available as a third-party external tool through Canvas; it allows students to annotate PDF articles, images, textbooks, videos, podcasts, and webpages. The tool is FERPA compliant (privacy policy) and offers various accessibility tools to meet all student’s needs.
If you’d like to discuss how to most effectively use Perusall in your own courses, please feel free to reach out to the [email protected], or request a consultation here. We’ll be happy to help you!
References & Resources
[1] Three Ways to Promote Student Ownership of Reading Assignments (2019)- Faculty Focus
[2] How to Get Students to Read What’s Assigned Special Report- Faculty Focus
[3] Miller, K., Lukoff, B., King, G., & Mazur, E. (2018). Use of a social annotation Platform for Pre-class reading assignments in a Flipped introductory Physics class. In Frontiers in education (Vol. 3, p. 8). Frontiers.
[4] Weimer, M. (2015). Getting students to do the reading. Faculty Focus
[5] Walker, A.S. (2019) Perusall: Harnessing AI Robo-Tools and Writing Analytics to Improve Student Learning and Increase Instructor Efficiency
Perusall Overview- LSA
