Motivating students to read literature
How do you motivate your students to read the material before they come to class? The VU has 2 tools specifically designed for this purpose: Feedbackfruits Interactive Document and Perusall. In both tools you upload the reading material of your course. Students read the material together and place annotations directly in the documents. Other students can see this and respond to it. This way students can help each other understand the literature and start discussions about it even before the class has started. This makes online learning more social and students will reach deeper understanding of the reading material.
The way to make students engage with a text, is to have them make annotations. An annotation can be anything from a question, to a summary, to a comment, as long as it helps with the understanding of the text. On this page we will tell you all about the didactics behind the annotation tools Perusall and Feedbackfruits Interactive Document: what value do these tools have and how do you use them effectively? Want to know more about the technical side? Go to the Tools tab on this page.
Before you use Perusall or FeedbackFruits, think for which goal you want to use the tools. Do you want to use the tools for assessment? Or you want to use them for literature in a course.
Explain clearly the purpose of making annotations to students and communicate your expectations with them.
To stimulate students to participate, set a minimum required number of annotations for students. Studies have shown that 7 annotations per article is the best way to go.
Publish the assignment in time so students have lots of time to make good quality annotations and to respond to annotations of others. Do not set the deadline at midnight to prevent students from reading and annotating at night.
Use the challenging topics as input for your lecture or workgroups and continue the started discussions to reach a higher level of understanding among students.
Good practice
Pitfalls
- Know with what purpose you want to use these tools and set up the assignment accordingly. Using these tools just for the sake of using them is not a good idea. It should just be a means to reach your goal.
- Don't make too many pages of text mandatory for your students. It takes time to make good quality annotations and adding too many pages will overwhelm your students.
- Don't interfere with the annotations of students. If students have a question or when they go the wrong way, the tool is not the best way to raise this. Wait and see if other students help them go in the right direction and if not, discuss this topic during a live contact moment.
- These tools are not a substitute for synchronous discussion. They are great input to continue the started discussion, but to really reach deeper understanding of the literature a live contact moment is necessary.
- Sometimes the discussion doesn't get started or students don't take the assignment seriously. To stimulate discussions it's a good idea to set a minimum amount of annotations that need to be a response to other students. To let students take it more serious, you could give a grade to the quality of work (Perusall helps with this) and let this be small part of their total grade.