We are thrilled to share two new research articles about Perusall with the education community! These articles offer educators insight on how social learning through Perusall can enhance student engagement and increase learning outcomes.

The first study, Empowering Active Learning: A Social Annotation Tool for Improving Student Engagement, published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (October 2023) [here]  investigates the impact of Perusall on an online postgraduate course conducted over two semesters at an Australian university. The findings indicate that pre-class social annotations have a positive impact on students' performance on post-class assessments. Notably, this study showed that students that are enrolled in English as an Additional Language, with low English proficiency achieve comparable results in Perusall as those with high English proficiency, which the authors conclude is a result of improved pre-class engagement.

The second study, Social Annotation: What are Students’ Perceptions and How does Social Annotation Relate to Grades?, published in Research in Learning Technology (October 2023) [here] also shows the positive effects of social annotation through Perusall. In this article, educator Virginia Clinton-Lisell discovers that social annotation promotes active reading, which encourages better understanding of course content. Notably, this study reports “higher-than-average opportunities for representational justice with social annotation (i.e. opportunities to share experiences and speak from their identities),” which the authors conclude is the result of the inclusive online community students create while using Perusall.

In both studies, using Perusall, students were more engaged in pre-class assignments and more conversational in their annotations with classmates, resulting in increased student learning, motivation and community building.

We are always on the lookout to discover more published studies on Perusall. Thank you to our community for sharing!

If you’re interested in learning more about Perusall, contact us for a demo today!