Perusall Exchange®

How do you form effective student teams? Among educators, this question is enduring and continues to be studied (Forrest & Miller, 2003;Longmore et al., 1996). Instructors struggle to (a) distinguish between groups and teams and (b) create teams that actually work well together. Additionally, students consistently report negative experiences with peer work (Monson, 2018), leaving their educational experiences with multiple stories of group projects marred by miscommunication, lack of accountability, unmanaged conflict, and poor participation from one or more teammates. Faculty also often find themselves in the sticky position of mediating these issues once it is too late. Effective teamwork requires guidance and facilitation from faculty. For students, it also requires knowledge and skills that– like content-specific knowledge and skills– educators can develop through carefully designed, scaffolded social learning experiences. By creating intentional space, time, and support for students to explore what it means to work and learn well in teams, educators can effectively equip students to build skills that will aid them in future academic and professional pursuits, in addition to providing a valuable foundation for use in their personal lives negotiating complex and contextual social problems. In this session, we will offer a model for developing classroom-based teams that promote effective social learning. Drawing on our instructional design data from our graduate and undergraduate courses, we will highlight three ways to facilitate effective social learning in teams: encourage identity exploration, center empathy, and provide tools for structured team interactions. A fruitful first step in setting students up for successful social learning begins with individual exploration of personal identity and critical reflection on how our identities show up in team project spaces. We add a social science intervention to this step to help elicit self-transcendent purposes for social learning in teams (Yeager et al., 2014). Second, equipping students to center empathy when (a) interacting with their team members and (b) advocating for themselves sets the stage for compassionate problem solving to be the ensuing response when team conflict arises. Finally, it is essential to provide structural tools for students engaging in team-based social learning. Such tools can be norms, scripts, and project frameworks like scrum and Kanban, all used to reduce the management burden of creating a system that delegates tasks, balances demands, tracks progress, and provides insights. By implementing this tested, three-part model, educators can confidently set their students up for success in team-based social learning environments.

This paper presents "Project Prompt," a research-based framework for designing three-dimensional, physical objects that prompt social learning, illustrated by several case studies of student work from a graduate-level pedagogy course. In 2018, I published a scholarly book on design titled Prompt: Socially Engaging Objects and Environments. The introduction states: "People are social beings...to expand upon the connection between individuals and their environments begins by exploring the interactions that take place between two or more people, as well as between people and their surroundings." Prompt offers psychosocial theories and a taxonomy for social engagement that educators can apply in classrooms. Specifically, one of the concepts presented in Prompt is social objects, which are objects that spark conversation, promote dialog, and help individuals achieve specific goals, including learning. Over the past two years, the Prompt book and the idea of creating social learning objects have been the center of a graduate module in a project-based learning (PBL) course at The University of Texas at Austin titled Design Pedagogy. Students learn to teach design in this course by creating three-dimensional, social learning objects. The driving question that launches the project is: "How might you prompt learning?" The module builds upon this question and the big idea that educators can use evidence-based frameworks to design classroom objects to achieve social learning. Interdisciplinary teams collaborate to create a set of three-dimensional objects that teach design content through direct human interaction. Notably, the assignment prioritizes low-tech solutions. For "Project Prompt," students first define a design concept that their object will teach. Example topics include how to draw in perspective and classroom design. Students use design research methods to identify misconceptions that new learners often experience when attempting to understand the chosen topic. Next, students use Backward Design to identify learning outcomes that they expect their three-dimensional objects to deliver through human interaction. The class also develops evaluation plans to assess the learning outcomes. Finally, students create corresponding instructional activities to drive the social learning between the object and the associated learner. Core to the student projects is the requirement to design the three-dimensional objects using the Prompt framework to ensure their designs lead to the social engagement, interactions, and learning they intended to shape. In this paper, participants will learn through three visual case studies that illustrate what a social learning object is, how to design one, and why social learning objects prompt learning so effectively.

Electronic books and other digital materials are popular among college students for several reasons: they are accessible, easy to carry, engaging, and cost-effective. However, digital resources do not come without a cost for students and their instructors. One such concern has been raised by Maryanne Wolf who, in "Reader Come Home," argues that the fast nature of digital reading may hinder the slow processes of critical thinking, reflection, imagination, and empathy. Similarly, Janae Cohn in "Skim, Dive, and Surface: Teaching Digital Reading" has noted that students are not reading digital sources with proper techniques. Therefore, in order to truly benefit from digital resources, students need effective targeted strategies for engaging those resources. This paper will describe a set of strategies adapted from Wolf, Cohn, and others, for teaching digital reading skills to students enrolled in a first-year-writing course. Objectives - Briefly review literature on digital reading - Outline strategies for improving digital reading practices with Perusall - Evaluate a sample lesson digital reading lesson

Homework lets students practice the problem-solving process. The focus on process, rather than final answer, is particularly important. Unfortunately, many online homework systems, and some traditional pencil-and-paper strategies, grade only on the correct answer. This can shift student focus away from the thought process. Metacognitive homework, developed previously, uses a Peer Instruction-like model to deploy homework in two phases, similar to students answering ConcepTests before and after peer discussion. In this talk, we discuss our work scaling metacognitive homework to class of enrollment over 300 students. Our method requires no paid software, takes minimal instructor time to administer, and has yielded positive student response by the end of the term. We will also discuss how metacognitive homework extends the well-established learning strategies of Peer Instruction into the domain of homework.

This paper/presentation summarized design principles that emerged from an extended program of research applying situative theories of learning to social annotation (SA) and formative assessment in multiple online courses contexts. Expansive framing emerged in the research of Randi Engle (1965-2012) and is one of the most practical instruction frameworks using situative theories of knowing. Engle and colleagues convinced many that the following principles could ensure "generative" learning that transfers readily and widely: • Help learners problematize content from their own perspectives. • Push learners to connect course concepts with outside people, places, topics, and times. • Position learners as accountable authors who are participating in a larger disciplinary conversation. As will be articulated in the full paper, Engle articulated five explanations of why these principles will help students (a) "transfer-in" and use their relevant prior knowledge and experience, (b) adapt more effective learning strategies, (c) envision likely transfer contexts, (d) use their new knowledge with authority in transfer contexts, (e) author new knowledge in new contexts. In 2008, we began embedding expansive framing within a situative "multi-level" framework for formative and summative assessment. We introduced SA to support a situative engagement strategy called personalized resource ranking. Once students have personally problematized course content, they can rank learning resources or ideas in learning resources in order of personal relevance. For example: • Introduce SA by having students rank the relevance of the course objectives in the syllabus, providing justification that says something about them as learners. Also, introduce platform-specific strategies (upvoting, commenting on comments). • SA assignments have students identify the most relevant and least relevant resource or idea among curated sets of resources or ideas. Learners are instructed to compare and comment on nuanced differences in peer rankings. • Instructors upvote and comment on expansively framed rationale and other particularly productive forms of engagement. Other features of this approach minimize inefficient private instructor-student interaction, freeing up time for more efficient instructor SA: • Reflections that summatively assess this engagement (facilitating grading) while formatively assessing understanding and future engagement. • Formative self-assessments efficiently enhance achievement. • The LMS automatically grades time-limited summative multiple-choice exams that include unsearchable "best answer" items. Starting in 2019, these and other features have been further refined to help minoritized students transfer-in their diverse funds of knowledge and identity and use it to learn. These features support generative learning for all students.

The goal of this presentation is to discuss the use of social annotation as a pedagogical tool to support student growth. Use of Perusall was combined with unique methods to promote comprehension, application, generation, and dissemination of experimental ideas as applied to topics within forensic psychology. Typically, undergraduate students vary in their level of exposure and ability to understand and develop good experimental design. From a program curriculum perspective, this is one of the tangible skills we want our students to have throughout the course of their degree. As such, in a senior level seminar class, I developed a three-pronged scaffolded learning approach to accomplish this aim. To foster skill development, I utilized social annotation as a critical step one in improving student understanding of psychological experiments. Not only did social annotation expose students to relevant concepts and examples of experimental design, it prompted them to engage with the material beyond a surface level. Students provided commentary about conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to the how and why of experiments, which aided them in developing their own experimental ideas. Step two in the scaffolded approach was use of the content of annotated empirical articles to springboard the development of individual experimental design ideas. From there, I employed a new approach that I developed from combining the “3MT” (3-minute-thesis) model with speed dating. In essence, students expanded upon the knowledge gained from social annotations and developed their own ‘experimental pitch’ that they were required to give in 3 minutes to a small group of classmates. Each group then had to select the most successful pitch weekly to bring forward to a larger class discussion, where we analyzed several designs in more detail. Ultimately, all of this was designed to lead to step three in which students prepared their own written experimental design proposal on the topic, aided by the multi-layered reinforcement of these skills throughout the course. The approach discussed here provides a useful model for scaffolding skills that an instructor wishes to develop or support in their students and could be applied to an assortment of course structures and topics.

How we assess student learning has become a centrally important topic, especially in the changing landscape of higher education today. How might we make assessment more authentic and engaging? How might digital technologies help make assessment more socially connected and meaningful for students and instructors? Join panelists Maikel Alendy, Lauren Barbeau, Karen Huxtable-Jester, and Jaya Kannan for an engrossing hour of conversation as we explore how social learning can influence and perhaps improve assessment.

Help students with their "speed to engagement" and contextual awareness with a new starter exercise wherein students receive a structured, random location for annotations. Why is that valuable? Students sometimes struggle to engage because they struggle to find their insertion point in the engagement activities presented. The suggested exercise maintains the learning challenge (content agnostic) while significantly reducing the insertion opportunity challenge. And, it can meaningfully increase total class engagement in a greater surface area of the assigned content by randomly dispersing ownership of discussion. Instead of students hovering around areas of personal familiarity or areas where the most "action is happening," or even [positively] areas of great interest, this approach permits students to grow by design. It intentionally creates the regular requirement to lead off in topics of discussion. This exercise also supports fairness through the use of a randomization process (rather than overly prioritizing those first to post, anchored to areas of expertise, or motivated by hot button issues).

Perusall users can attest that the platform has changed the way students interact with readings and with each other, but how specifically? Has it changed the way students read? Do students leverage Perusall’s features to develop new reading strategies? Does the social nature of the platform alter typical reading behaviors? Is there an “ideal” time to release a new reading to promote maximum engagement? Rather than offering answers to these and other questions, this presentation serves as a call to action, an encouragement to use Perusall analytics to study student reading behaviors. Perusall analytics make it possible for us to gain insight into aspects of student reading behaviors that were previously invisible, allowing us to study questions we might have about this type of student learning from new perspectives. However, the platform also makes new types of reading behaviors possible and opens up a world of new opportunities for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects. Perusall users face the exciting possibilities of exploring a new research frontier! The proposed oral presentation would include an overview and examples of the analytics reports Perusall can provide with prompts for participants to review their own data reports. For participants new to SoTL, the presentation would include a very brief introduction to what SoTL is and how it applies to Perusall. Participants would then be prompted to apply their inductive reasoning skills to consider the kinds of questions Perusall data can help us ask or answer about student reading behaviors. Ideally, this presentation will foster a growing body of scholarship not just about Perusall as a tool but about student reading practices in the digital age more broadly.

Live Keynote Event

The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the peer teaching method from a social studies perspective on the basis of the researcher's experiences. Peer teaching, an interaction-oriented method, is a student-centered method that guides democratic approaches, and has both cognitive and affective aspects. Thus, the application of this method in social studies lead to important advantages in that it enables communication in the classroom. The content of the social studies covers a wide range of topics selected from social sciences in order to raise good, responsible and effective citizens and the social studies aims at transferring knowledge, skills and attitudes about social life. Since its content is verbal and needs to be interpreted more than other fields, the methods and techniques used in social studies should also be of this nature, provide a discussion environment by putting the student in the center, and enable the individual to think more critically and to be creative. Peer teaching method, which was developed by a physicist, Eric Mazur, has been tried and implemented in the social studies course as well. In the literature, studied on the peer teaching method was carried out with different samples in different periods. The academic achievement of secondary school students, their attitudes towards the course, their critical thinking skills and their effects on the permanence of their learning have been examined. In addition, the effectiveness of its use in teacher education on pre-service social studies teachers’ academic success and creative thinking skills was investigated. It is concluded in these studies that peer teaching is effective not only in science courses but also in verbal courses such as social studies.

For the past few decades, one of the most significant developments in the US has been the worsened economic inequality due to skill-biased technological progress and import competition that affects every facet of our lives. The proposed scholarship and teaching development study the effect of economic inequality on instructional design and student learning and skill acquisition and study policies to mitigate the adverse effects of inequality. The project's crucial novelty is to analyze an instructor's instructional design to maximize students' satisfaction (via the course evaluation) subject to students' choosing their effort level to maximize their utilities following the framework of the principal-agent model. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first paper that applies the principal-agent model to instructional design that explicitly studies the effect of instructor grading schemes and student teaching evaluation schemes on student efforts, skill acquisition, and instructor evaluation. Then the analysis will allow us to evaluate policies designed to alleviate adverse effects due to inequality, such as the 'one-to-one' laptop program in the state of Connecticut that provides a learning device to every PK-12 student in need.

A community of inquiry and its educational experience is made up of three components: social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. Professor Bridget Mueller, Dr. Dagmar Scharold, and Manuel Fernandez discuss the way Perusall serves the community of inquiry model by providing instructional design examples, their experience in the classroom, and discussing what gaps if any, exist when analyzing Perusall activities through this model/framework.

The aim of this study was to reveal the views of university students about force, motion and the relationship between force and motion and to reveal the effectiveness of the Peer Instruction method on student achievement. The research has an quasi-experimental design with unequal experimental and control groups. The sample of the research population consists of first-year students attending Pamukkale University Faculty of Education Science Education Department in the fall semester of 2005-2006 academic year. In order to determine the alternative concepts of the students about force and motion, a 4-question questionnaire consisting of open-ended questions was applied. The three questions in this questionnaire were developed by Jimoyiannis and Komis (2003) and applied in a study in Greece. The fourth question was taken from the textbook. This question has been added to reveal students' ideas about the application of Newton's Laws to Circular Motion. The answers given by the students to these four questions were analyzed and the students were grouped according to their mental models. To assess students' understanding of force and motion;The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) consisting of 30 questions created and developed by Halloun and Hestenes (1985) was applied as an achievement test. Before the application, the reliability of the test was measured as 0.70. The materials used in this study;concept tests, pre-reading assignments and study questions. Reading assignments from the textbook were given in order to enable students to try to learn the subject by reading themselves before the lesson and to increase student participation in the discussion sections, thus helping them to improve their understanding. In addition, students were responsible for end-unit questions, conceptual questions, and complex questions that require explanation in the textbook. Our analysis has identified three discernible groups of students 1) An extended group of students having common misconceptions, 2) a second group of students, which generally responded correctly to the tasks, 3) a third group of students, which ignored the presence of the gravitational force and believe that the action-reaction forces were both exerted to the ball during its motion. According to the t-test results performed to determine whether the difference between the post-test scores of the experimental and control groups is significant, the difference between the post-test scores is significant at the 0.05 level (t: 6.95;P < 0.05). It was found that;Peer Instruction method is much more effective about students’ progression academic achievement than traditional methods.

Social learning is part of our hominid heritage, from the oldest stone chopper tools made by Homo habilis to modern technologies like smartphones, blockchains, and weapons of ever increasing mass destruction. But how do we teach this to students? We teach it through the process of social learning, just as we have from the dawn of our species and even our genus. As our capacity for social learning has increased, so too has our entanglement with technology. And as the operational chains that underwrite technology grow more and more complex, they become the source of bottlenecks that limit access to knowledge. What better way to teach these ideas than to work in teams and discover how entanglements, operational chains, and bottlenecks operate at all scales of social learning. As instructors we provide key information to overcome learning bottlenecks that are not so different from those that gave rise to durable inequalities during the Bronze Age. In fact, since our course is about the impact of materials on society, these bottlenecks in manufacturing and scientific knowledge--as well as the physical control of raw materials--continue to define the world economy today. We will present a team- and project-based pedagogical approach developed for our co-taught course, “Making Things: Three Million Years of Materials and Culture,” which draws on our fields of Materials Science and Engineering and Archaeology. In addition, we will discuss the use of self-assessment and reflection that incorporates a team based component. We will also touch on how Perusall’s new feature of student uploaded documents can enhance this kind of social learning.

There is a great need for cross-boundary interaction in education. The cross-boundary learning is becoming a universal social learning model. However, cross-boundary learning activities do not happen automatically and need to be triggered, maintained and promoted by specific mechanisms. Based on theoretical and practical exploration of a case carried out by the author involving calligraphers, painters, musician, linguists, government officials and students from different disciplines and different countries, this paper illustrates the “NO WAR” strategy in cross-boundary learning. N: Network O: Organize W: Work A: Attract R: Reflect With the rapid development of new technologies, the rules and problems of cross-boundary learning under the Internet environment are further explored in this case establishing clear themes, providing organized, meaningful, responsible and attractive communication scenarios, promoting participants in different activity systems to cross the boundaries of their fields and interact with participants in other activity systems, then to form a new collective concept.

There is a great need for cross-boundary interaction in education. The cross-boundary learning is becoming a universal social learning model. However, cross-boundary learning activities do not happen automatically and need to be triggered, maintained and promoted by specific mechanisms. Based on theoretical and practical exploration of a case carried out by the author involving calligraphers, painters, musician, linguists, government officials and students from different disciplines and different countries, this paper illustrates the “NO WAR” strategy in cross-boundary learning. N: Network O: Organize W: Work A: Attract R: Reflect With the rapid development of new technologies, the rules and problems of cross-boundary learning under the Internet environment are further explored in this case establishing clear themes, providing organized, meaningful, responsible and attractive communication scenarios, promoting participants in different activity systems to cross the boundaries of their fields and interact with participants in other activity systems, then to form a new collective concept.

Eric Mazur initially developed Peer Instruction as a social learning method for face-to-face classrooms. The bulk of applied scholarship on Peer Instruction spanning three decades addresses recommendations and guidelines for in-person implementation. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for evidence-based pedagogies that facilitate learning in online and virtual environments skyrocketed. In this session, the authors draw on recent scholarship to explore options for deploying Peer Instruction in synchronous online, hybrid, and asynchronous modalities in ways that align with the science of learning.

One way to teach difficult content is to use games and stories. People more often remember a story someone tells them (social interaction). But to understand the game or story, students need to have background in the field. Cybersecurity is a field on the cutting edge and constantly changing. Traditional textbooks do not match the most current content, and the newest topics. In Perusall it is possible to bring together the seminal works on cybersecurity and usable design and the latest research. The commentary the students add relates older content to the real-world events they predict. These comments become the building blocks for a game which in turn reinforces the content. The students tell each other stories to teach each other.

During a live roundtable discussion, moderated by Eric Mazur, co-founder of Perusall, five students share their experiences using Perusall in their courses. The students range from outgoing freshman to post-graduate and represent a range of experience using the social e-learning platform.