In previous posts I talking about how I encouraged discussion by posting Questions to Consider and using Question Papers. My newest discovery is the use of Perusall. After I gave up on Question Papers for my first-year seminar, I wanted to try something new.
I had read about Perusall on a variety of teaching Facebook groups (e.g., Society for Teaching of Psychology), and I thought I would try it out. I reached out to our teaching center to see if they could show me the ropes, but they were unfamiliar with it. I found a faculty member who used it, and we had a meeting where he showed me the ropes (and folks from our teaching and technology centers came to learn as well).
Once I learned what I was doing, it was remarkably easy to set up, and I used it with my first-year seminar this fall. You can link specific assignments to Canvas (our learning management system), and it gives students an opportunity to annotate directly onto the text. You can find out if the textbook you use is available on Perusall through their site. The first edition of our textbook is available, and when the second edition becomes available, it will likely become an option for this as well.
I started by going through the text and highlighting aspects that resonated or spoke to me and prompted a follow up question. For example, when the authors discussed a phenomenon, I may ask “Has this ever happened to you?” or “Can you relate to this?” Students then would have something to respond to. Students could also highlight any aspect of the text and annotate directly. They could also reply to other students’ annotations in addition to my annotation. They had their most vigorous back-and-forth discussions on the sections of the text they highlighted themselves rather than the prompts I started with.
When I posted research articles, I used the annotations to give them guidance on how to read the articles. I explained what the purpose of the Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion sections were. I guided them to know, for example, that the results are usually summarized at the beginning of the discussion and where to look for limitations and what kinds of things to look for. I think there’s more one could do with annotating articles in a more research-focused class, but it was a good start. You can upload articles or other content into Perusall for free.
I used the Perusall annotations to organize class discussion. Each day before class, I would read over the annotations and take notes on themes that resonated with students. Then I would introduce the topic to promote class discussion (e.g., I noticed many of you commented on X) and use that to stimulate discussion. This worked pretty well. Students had already thought about the issues but were also able to add on to what others were saying in real-time.
A unique thing about Perusall is that it auto grades. There was a lot of initial anxiety from both me and students about the auto-grading, so I will explain it in a bit more detail. You can modify your automatic scoring settings in Perusall, and they have a lot of pre-set settings. I used their “holistic” scoring but tweaked it to fit my needs. First, you can set how many points each assignment is worth and then link it with the same points in Canvas. I set each assignment to 10 points (and then made an average of their reading annotations worth 10% of their grade). Also, I made the scoring worth more than 100% (which is a practice Perusall recommends), so that students can have multiple ways to get credit.
I had comment content worth 50% and set it so they got full credit for high quality comments, two-thirds credit for medium quality comments, and half credit for low quality comments. This was the most mysterious part because the AI decided what was low, medium, and high (vaguely related to word count). However, what was useful for students was that a little Perusall owl would pop up for them and give them feedback if their comments were not high quality and encourage them to flesh out their ideas. I gave them 5% for opening the assignment (easy), 15% for reading to the end (which they can presumably get for quickly flipping through the pages so I may decrease this in the future), 25% for active engagement time (I specify how many minutes they need to be reading the assignments to get full credit), 10% for getting responses from other students, and 10% for upvoting other students’ comments. In the end, almost everyone got full credit on most of the assignments so maybe my settings were too lenient.
Overall, the students were motivated, enjoyed Perusall a lot, and left really thoughtful comments on the readings. They all came to class having read and thought about what we were discussing that day, and it helped get the conversation flowing. I am a brand new Perusall user, but I am enthusiastic about it so far. I am considering using it in other classes.
If any of you have experience with Perusall, I would love to hear about it in the comments!