Perusall Exchange^® Library

Faculty teaching classes with an emphasis on writing have responded to ChatGPT’s emergence in education with valid ethical questions and concern regarding the devaluation of writing. Two writing instructors, one of whom is also an instructional designer, explore these responses as well as the importance of helping students to define genre and purpose and use them to determine whether AI can be appropriately applied. Ultimately, the increasing accessibility of AI chatbots compels instructors and instructional designers to hold themselves to a higher standard, crafting specific and relevant writing prompts that motivate students to craft original writing.

Questions are a key way of clarifying not only course material, but also course policies and assignment prompts. However, not all students may feel equally comfortable asking questions, especially at the start of a course. I used Perusall syllabus and assignment annotation in an intermediate level biology course to ensure that all students were invited into conversation about my course and assignment design, and have their questions answered. Annotating the syllabus was an effective in-class practice exercise for future social annotation assignments, and assignment annotations were useful formative check-ins for students to monitor their progress towards their goals.

Peer Instruction (PI) was introduced by Mazur to help students learn physics concepts during lectures. Besides physics, PI has also been adopted in other STEM fields. In this approach, students answer a related question individually after a concept has been presented. Before they revote on the same question individually, they are asked to convince others their answer is correct during peer discussion. The percentage of correct answer typically increased after peer discussion. However, Smith et al. highlighted that the improvement may be due to copying, not because students actually learned how to reason correctly. To exclude copying, Smith et al. modified Mazur’s PI protocol by adding a second question Q2 after the students revote on the first question Q1. Q2 is ‘isomorphic’ to Q1, meaning that it requires the application of the same concept but the ‘cover story’ is different. Here, we simplify Smith et al.’s PI protocol by removing the revote on Q1. Moreover, our Q1 and Q2 are similar, i.e. the same but some information given is different. Our PI protocol is thus the same as Mazur’s, except the pre and post discussion questions are not exactly the same. We replace PI in our protocol by teacher’s instruction (TI) to compare the effectiveness of PI with TI for a pair of similar questions involving Lenz’s law, using Hake’s normalized gain and a statistical test. Our results show that TI is more effective than PI, in our protocol, for the highly challenging pair of similar questions involving Lenz’s law.

Over the past 30 years an abundance of research has demonstrated the benefits of Peer Instruction. The transition to remote teaching during the pandemic necessitated a re-evaluation of synchronous and asynchronous instructional activities. While Peer Instruction is readily adapted to a synchronous remote environment and beneficial to helping engage students at a distance, we began exploring making Peer Instruction more asynchronous. As we will show, our new approach to Peer Instruction offers many benefits, including an immediate reinforcement of asynchronous information transfer as well as more efficient and richer social learning for students. Most importantly, it permits using synchronous time with students — regardless of whether this time is spent remotely or in person — on activities that further scaffold understanding.

Live Keynote Event

Situated within the context of teacher education, this paper examines how a group of 30 pre- and in-service teachers (T) of English on a Master of Education Language Awareness (LA) course at the University in Hong Kong are empowered as ‘TLA experts’ on Perusall, take part in a series of synergized asynchronous and synchronous activities via Perusall designed by their instructor and experience significant TLA gains. Adopting the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000), the paper analyzes teacher learning in the three interrelated domains of social presence, instructor presence and cognitive presence. Guided by the social constructivist approach to teaching and learning and building on the ‘Perusall Managers’ model introduced by Tavares (2021), the teachers on the LA course are assigned by their instructor to be ‘TLA experts’ of designated areas. With a clearly defined focus and from different angles, these ‘experts’ initiate and facilitate exchanges on Perusall as they take charge of the analysis of texts in the form of authentic textbook and classroom-discourse excerpts. Acknowledging one another’s visible social presence on the platform by their leadership and management of discussions, the ‘experts’ report enjoying their collaborative inquiry and working closely as a COI to “complete a puzzle to form a whole picture together” which challenges them to think from multiple perspectives and deepens their theoretical understanding. The paper discusses how the instructor makes use of the functionalities on Perusall to amplify instructor presence, boost the experts’ confidence, and promote timely and ongoing professional dialogues, thereby tightening their bonding as a COI in their journey of knowledge co-construction. It highlights how social presence and instructor presence impact positively on the experts’ motivation to interact and engage with the course content and texts, which in turn strengthens their cognitive presence. Specifically, emphasis is placed on how the instructor pedagogically organizes the interactive learning environment, tasks and activities in the synchronous virtual LA classroom amid the COVID-19 pandemic to further sharpen the experts’ critical thinking skills, and foster a climate conducive to their re-evaluation and re-interpretation of their analyses of more complex topics via Perusall. The design of the end-of-the-LA-course assessment to reinforce their TLA is also explored. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for the teachers-as-TLA-experts initiative and makes recommendations on ways of maximizing the affordances of Perusall in teacher learning and empowerment.

Collaborative annotation takes advantage of one’s natural tendency to mark up a text, to then bring those thoughts out in the open. This creates a natural formative assessment environment for document critique where student thoughts, instructor thoughts, peer-to-peer corrections, and instructor-to-student corrections can all play out in a collaborative critique and subsequent refinement of that critique. The instructor’s input can serve as a model for critique in a given discipline, and peer-to-peer commentary can lighten the feedback provision load of the instructor. Studies on collaborative annotation as assessment should benefit from clear comparator conditions within the same student population. In the current study, collaborative annotation was compared to a traditional reading assessment template, and two annotation platforms (Perusall and hypothes.is) were also compared, in the same student population, annotating the same type of content. Results indicate that students preferred collaborative annotation over a traditional templated reading assessment by a roughly 4:1 ratio. The vast majority of students exceeded the minimum annotation requirement given by the instructor. Further supporting annotation as a process, the students improved in annotation quality over time, regardless of the order in which students used each of the annotation platforms. Students also showed either a steady or an increasing percentage of threaded annotations over time, indicative of collaboration. All of these points should be encouraging for the annotation platform designers, or instructors considering the use of an annotation platform for their classes, as it suggests that students develop some natural fluency with collaborative annotation. The study also indicates higher annotation output with Perusall in one of the student cohorts, and annotation outputs are discussed in regards to pedagogical significance, alongside student commentary. The data analysis routine in this study can serve as a practical template for student output, where baselines are still being established with various student populations. The educational technology, peer learning, and assessment fields have much to gain in the future from analysing student responses to dynamically annotated text.

General Chemistry is typically viewed as a challenging course for students. Most students can develop a good understanding of basic concepts and use essential algebraic skills after the class, but they are utterly lost when facing complicated concepts and comprehensive problems. In addition, with the large class sizes (typically hundreds of students in each class) at research universities, instructors often are not given chances to explain details to each student individually. Collaborative problem solving is introduced in the classes to address the issues mentioned above and promote students' ability to untangle complicated questions. After each lecture, a set of questions that are known to be confusing and challenging to students are carefully selected and assigned to students in Perusall. Then, students are asked to collaboratively work out the possible solutions and evaluate each other's solutions through comments and upvotes. Misconceptions disclosed in the collaborations are clarified in class the next day. Preliminary results from students' performance after collaborative problem-solving implementation are collected, and overall collaborative problem-solving strategies positively improve students' learning.

The success of the teaching practicum is a key indicator of the success and quality of an initial teacher education programme. There are specific elements that play a significant role in determining the quality of the practicum experience, namely the nature of relationships among the triad of student teacher, mentor teacher and teacher educator, opportunities for supportive reflection, formative assessment and feedback (Aspden, 2014). The teaching practicum is a social and relational act (Haigh & Ell, 2014). It may be argued that for a given period of time, a set of participants come together to form a temporary community (Goodnough et al., 2009), in which the student teacher works closely with others to negotiate a shared understanding and shared repertoire of practice. Caires, Almeida and Vieira (2012) suggest that attention has shifted in research from considering the individual roles and responsibilities of the triad members, to greater consideration of the affective-relational elements of the student teacher-mentor teacher and/or teacher educator relationships. Wenger (2000) has argued that although individuals learn through participation in a community of practice, more important is the generation of newer or deeper levels of knowledge through the sum of the group activity. Processes aimed at improving collaboration between universities and schools, and specifically between the triad are few and far between. This lack of collaboration, the emphasis placed on and prevalent use of technology during the COVID-19 pandemic and comments made by the triad triggered the consideration of a social annotation platform, Perusall, to enhance collaboration between schools and universities for the benefit of the practicum triad. In this study, the Perusall platform will be utilised in an innovative way to allow student teachers, mentor teachers as well as the teacher educators to engage in a learning cycle focused on core teaching practices (e.g., explaining/modelling content) by utilising the platform not only for reading of texts, related to core teaching practices, but also for video analysis. The purpose of the presentation will be to report on the extent to which the usage of the Perusall platform enhances the teaching practicum triad’s dialogic engagement on teaching practices as well as the student teachers’ reflective practices.

Join former Peer Instruction rookie, now proudly self-proclaimed amateur, Dr. Cassandre Giguere Alvarado discuss her journey to the “big leagues” of teaching: using Peer Instruction. In this podcast, Alvarado, a Professor in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and baseball enthusiast, discusses the challenges of adapting PI to courses in the fields of communication and education. Listen as she tackles the challenge of working with peer instruction in disciplines where there are few, if any, correct answers, and how she grew to love and help her students love using peer instruction where ambiguity reigns. Her journey includes examples of learning with a spectrum of classroom experiences, from graduate students to first-year students, in two different, yet similar disciplines.

The Experts of Magical EdTech at Pima Community College continue to face an onslaught of the dementors of the online space–learner disengagement and boredom. Despite their prolific use of Expecto Patoronum the dementors continue to persist. In an effort to dispel the horrors of disengagement once and for all, they are exploring the magic of Perusall in their battle for the attention of the learners. To fully understand the impact of Perusall our experts have conducted learner surveys and interviews with the hope of understanding what learners want from peer-to-peer interactions. Grab your Extendable Ears and join in on this discussion overviewing the qualitative and quantitative data on peer-to-peer engagement through Perusall collected at Pima Community College. Survey findings revealed learners reporting peer-to-peer interactions as a top benefit of using Perusall. Be sure to bring your Quick-Quotes Quill as highlights from interviews with instructors and learners about their experiences with online discussion will also be shared. These insights emphasize how the implementation of Perusall has improved peer-to-peer engagement and become an effective tool for dispelling disengagement at Pima Community College. Please note this content is for all, including muggles (non-magic folk) and magic folk alike.

Syllabus is a contract that binds students with an instructor. It regulates the flow of the content of the lectures and their effectiveness in enhancing students' knowledge and skills. Its design and implementation should take into account the diversity and variability in learning styles of the students. One of the ways to reach these objectives is to list and pose Essential Questions every week instead of listing topics under Week 1, Week 2 etc. These questions should be specific, insightful, and inspire students to make connections and get an integrated picture of the course. Students will explore and develop their passions resonating with one and more questions and the topics that questions represent. Different questions will interest different students and thus providing a fulfilling experience to diverse set of learners. It will add depth and thoughtfulness to the learning. In regard to making learning outcomes specific and measurable, I would like to follow the CABD framework.Here C stands for Conditions, A for Actor, B for Behavior, and D for Degree. If I am teaching a Physics/Astronomy class my learning outcome will be structured as follows: Given the concept of expanding Universe, introductory physics/astronomy students will create PowerPoint presentations explaining and calculating the expansion rate of the Universe that agrees with Cosmic Microwave Background Observational Data within 10%. This assignment will use Bloom's Taxonomy component Create. This effort will engage students to explore, investigate, construct, design, and create knowledge. In regard to making learning outcomes specific and measurable, I would like to follow the CABD framework.Here C stands for Conditions, A for Actor, B for Behavior, and D for Degree. If I am teaching a Physics/Astronomy class my learning outcome will be structured as follows: Given the concept of expanding Universe, introductory physics/astronomy students will create PowerPoint presentations explaining and calculating the expansion rate of the Universe that agrees with Cosmic Microwave Background Observational Data within 10%. This assignment will use Bloom's Taxonomy component Create. This effort will engage students to explore, investigate, construct, design, and create knowledge.

In this session, we will present original research on Peer Instruction that we published in 2021. For that research, we analyzed 45 master’s degree theses among students training to be physics teachers from the period of 2004 to 2020. We also surveyed a sample of these teachers to investigate the most frequent changes they made to the Peer Instruction method, and why these changes were made. We discovered that the most recurrent changes to Peer Instruction among students training to be physics teachers are related to the preparation assignments and the application of ConcepTests in classroom. In addition, we will share explanatory hypotheses that we developed as a starting point for future studies on the topic of Peer Instruction in teacher training. Likewise, we will highlight the results achieved in the Brazilian educational context with the results of North American studies.

The equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass has many surprising consequences, beyond feather and baseball falling together in vacuum . The angles in a chain flyer ride are independent of the mass of the rider [1] and you can twin swing with an empty swing. Single and double blocks slide together on an inclined plane, and small or large balls can roll side by side down a playground slide [3]. The equivalence lets you feel weightless during free fall - but also at the top of roller coaster hills and loops [4], which can be used to entice students to many challenging discussions. The experience of the body, feeling heavier at the bottom of a swing or roller coaster valley, can help students realize that the acceleration is not zero at the lowest point [4], which is a common misconception [5]. The expectation that mass always influences acceleration is quite persistent. Even students who have observed that the density has no (i.e. very small) effect on balls with the same radius roilling down a slide are often tempted to use mass as an explanation when they see a compact ball rolling faster than a hollow one [3]. Small group discussions let students discuss the different observations and help them discern how different physics principles interplay. For many years, I have been involved in courses where peer instruction in lectures has been combined with supervised extended group projects, including written and oral reports with "opposition" from another group [6]. The scaffolded discussions throughout the project work give rich opportunities for students to discover inconsistencies in their conceptions. As always, teacher interactions and interventions during preparation, visits and follow-up is essential for student learning. [7]. [1] Pendrill (2018), Rotating swings - a theme with variations, Physics Education 51 15014 [2] Pendrill (2014) The equivalence principle comes to school - falling objects and other middle school investigations, Physics Education 49 425 [3] Pendrill (2021) Balls rolling down a playground slide: What factors influence their motion?, Physics Education 56 015005 [4] Pendrill et al (2019) Students making sense of motion in a vertical roller coaster loop, Physics Education 54 065017 [5] Reif (1995) Millikan lecture 1994: Understanding and teaching important scientific thought processes, American Journal of Physics 63, 17 [6] Wistedt (2001) Five Gender-Inclusive Projects Revisited, https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/18171 [7] Pendrill, Kozma and Theve (2013) Teacher Roles in amusement parks, Proceedings ICPE-GIREP, p 591-599

The online social annotation platform Perusall can be configured to award scores to students for the ‘quality’ or ‘insightfulness’ of their annotations of reading assignments. Using a sample of student annotations from an upper-level undergraduate course on Animal Behaviour, we evaluated inter-rater agreement between the scores awarded by the Perusall algorithm and five expert human raters (teachers in the course). Each human rater independently scored 500 annotations from diverse readings across the course content, using the same 3-step scoring rubric as Perusall (0=below expectations, 1=meets expectations, 3=exceeds expectations) and blind to the score awarded by the other human assessors. We assessed agreement across all six raters and for each pair of raters using Fleiss’ Kappa. Across the six raters, there was only slight inter-rater agreement overall (kappa=0.147). There was most agreement on ratings of 2 (k=0.234) and least agreement on ratings of 1 (k=0.050). Agreement between the Perusall ratings and those awarded by each of the human assessors ranged from k=0.155 (slight) to 0.366 (fair). Agreement between pairs of individual human raters ranged from k=0.196 (slight) to 0.476 (moderate). Thus, both the lowest and highest levels of agreement between human raters exceeded comparable values for Perusall-human agreement. The mean paired kappa between Perusall and the five human raters was k=0.285, which was at the lower end of the range of mean paired kappa values between each human rater and the other four human raters (min. k=0.293, max. k=0.402). The average rating awarded by Perusall (1.69) was higher than the average across human raters (1.31) or that for any individual rater (0.80-1.65). Our analysis suggests that although agreement between Perusall and individual human raters is generally slightly lower than between human raters, there is surprisingly large variation in agreement between human raters. As a result, ratings awarded by the Perusall algorithm do not show noticeably less agreement with human raters than these raters show among themselves.

Elaastic is a web-based application that allows teachers to implement formative assessment sequences with large groups of students, during face to face or distance courses. The application implements different workflows depending on the learning context. These workflows are all composed of five steps : (1) The teacher asks a choice or open-ended question to his/her group of students. (2) The students answer the question by providing a written justification. (3) The system then organises a peer review of the various contributions. (4) The students answer the question a second time. (5) The results are published after Elaastic processed all the collected data so that each student receives feedback on his/her answer. The sequence then usually ends with a discussion between teacher and students. Elaastic can be considered as an extended version of peer Instruction promoving written argumentation and anonymity in order to (1) limit cognitive bias and (2) provide the teacher with the opportunity to access students rational, misconceptions with a kind of popularity index. During our presentation we'll present the tool and the main benefits its provide to learners and teachers. We will share recent research results issued from works around Elaastic.

The COVID pandemic has demonstrated just how difficult it is to engage students with online learning, especially those in primary and secondary schools. High School students missed the in-person connections, social interactions and collaborative learning. While many schools are dismantling their remote classes, we at the Constellation Learning Institute, will continue to offer high quality online courses because of the flexibility it gives students. Software like Perusall have been fundamental to engaging our students. During our session, several teachers of high school online courses will demonstrate the various ways they have used Perusall to interact with each other and course content.

I use Perusall in an unorthodox fashion that has revealed the platform’s unique ability to recreate the most treasured experiences I enjoyed as a Harvard student in the mid 1980s – the ability to wander with my friends through the stacks at Widener and Lamont libraries, amass stacks of books, lug them back to a study room and then spend hours pouring through texts together, taking and sharing notes and having stimulating thought provoking conversations about the juxtaposition of so many often cognitively dissonant ideas. Perusall has become the perfect 21st-century (oxymoron alert!) “digital analog” for that formative period of intellectual ferment and Socratic Dialog. Our use of Perusall at both Mercy College in NY, where I teach undergraduate Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Sustainability, and Justice and Environmental Psychology, and at the University of South Florida’s Patel College of Global Sustainability where I teach graduate courses in Climate Mitigation and Adaptation, Navigating the Food/Energy/Water Nexus, Zero-Waste Concepts for a Circular Economy and Envisioning and Communicating Sustainability, has enabled us to successfully replicate on-line, for distance learning, what I enjoyed most about social learning in the real world. In my oral presentation I shall explore why we DON’T anymore connect our Perusall classes through the LMS to discrete courses in Blackboard and Canvas, why we DON’T use the “Assignments” tab and why INSTEAD we have created one massive MASTER CLASS with a comprehensive and growing Library of primary texts and articles, instructor created video lectures and auxiliary materials and student writings and projects organized into folders representing each of the courses I teach. We simulate the joy and effectiveness of the chance encounters we would have in Lamont library pulling an all-nighter, stumbling upon friends who were enrolled in different classes and were at different stages of their studies but were universally eager to get into cross-disciplinary conversations, trying out the new ideas they were engaged with on an audience with a different perspective or lens from another course. The peer instruction that occurred was endlessly enriched and informed by the diversity of budding intellectuals wandering through the libraries at all hours of the day and night. In that spirit, our use of Perusall as a Master Class Library is intergenerational, interdisciplinary and peer instruction oriented. We use it to carry on what historians have called “The Great Conversation”, a Socratic Dialectic that continues long past the semester’s end.

Genetics is a required course for biology majors that has a reputation for being difficult. Students are particularly intimidated by the math, but other deep issues exist, including a failure to connect the molecular processes to macro-level observations, and a reliance on overly simplistic models that can lead to genetic determinism rather than an appreciation of biological complexity. To overcome these issues I emphasize molecular mechanisms and complex phenotypes in my course. I was also inspired by the C.R.E.A.T.E. method to have students learn genetic concepts through deep analysis of primary literature. Over time I have redesigned my Genetics course to follow these principles: 1) incorporating a high level of social learning, 2) leading students to construct knowledge, 3) focusing on authentic research with an engaging theme, 4) providing lots of feedback and support, and 5) fostering a growth mindset. My syllabus now includes 14 articles on the theme of canine genetics, which has the advantages of being relatable to students and having a wealth of fascinating research with a wide range of genetic topics to draw on. Students are given the Learning Objectives (LOs) for each activity, which map to traditional Genetics topics (e.g., dominance, transposons, epigenetics). During class, students work in groups to answer carefully designed questions based on the articles, which draw on their foundational knowledge, lead them to discovery of genetic principles, and help make connections between ideas they learned in different contexts. These worksheets are provided as Google docs that the instructor and learning assistant (LA) monitor. The instructor and LA circulate during class to provide help, hints and clarification. After class students receive written feedback on their work before turning it in for a grade. Thus, they are encouraged to revisit and revise material. Each open-ended exam question is mapped to the LOs that students were given, and answers are initially evaluated simply as “met” or “unmet” for each LO. Then students have the chance to revise and resubmit their answers before the final grade is assigned. Most students loved having the opportunity to rethink their work and get a better grade. While grades were higher on average, the questions were difficult and no partial credit was given;thus few students earned a perfect score, even after revision. However, the grading was easier and clearly tied to achieving LOs, unlike traditional grading that assigns somewhat arbitrary amounts of partial credit for imperfect answers.

If you are interested in using group work in your courses but might be a bit intimidated, if you are using group work but are frustrated by it, if you have used group work but have sworn it off, I encourage any and all to listen to this two part series on the problems of group work and possible solutions. In this episode I have a conversation with Dr. Peggy Brickman of the University of Georgia about group work but from an unusual perspective. Instead of discussing the evidence demonstrating the positive impacts of well-designed group work on student success, we discuss the problems of group work. These discussions may provide the encouragement you need to finally implement group work, or may provide a solution to reduce your frustration with group work, or may convince you that group work is worth another try.