Social annotation plays a crucial role in nurturing and sustaining a collaborative reading community, offering the potential to enhance students' motivation and performance within socially supportive learning environments. Nonetheless, research on the dynamic changes in student engagement in social annotation remains limited. This study aims to…

A commonly-held belief is that many university students are 'assessment-driven'; that is, students engage more with activities that are assessed compared with those that are not. 'Incentivised engagement' includes the practice of providing incentives (such as marks or otherwise) for students to engage in particular activities. Perusall is a social…

The purpose of the study was to examine (a) students' social annotation behaviors and engagement change in an undergraduate course throughout the semester, and (b) which social annotation behaviors impact active engagement time. A total of 91 university students' social annotation behaviors, as well as their active engagement time in readings,…

Microlearning, as an informal learning approach, has gained increasing popularity in both the training industry and professional studies disciplines over the last several years. However, despite the rising interest in microlearning, how to design microlearning activities and what microcontent is reasonable for microlearning activities have rarely…

Motivating students to learn and engaging them in the learning process is a constant struggle among teachers. The lack of motivation and engagement in reading lessons is one-reason elementary students are struggling to reach proficiency in reading. This systematic review used current literature to investigate the best practices seen in elementary…

Hoping to increase student engagement, the author decided to re-envision his course on contemporary global issues in a "flipped" format. The results proved encouraging--to a degree. Over the course of five semesters, applying lessons gleaned from the literature, students learned how to read challenging texts outside of class and…

Flipped classrooms and inquiry-based learning (IBL) have each become popular in their own right, leading to a natural question: Why not combine these two great ideas? Although flipping a class usually involves students reading or watching videos before class, and IBL focuses on allowing and encouraging students to develop material on their own,…

Instructors are always looking for new ways to engage students in reading assignments. The authors present a few techniques that rely on a web-based data visualization tool called Wordle (wordle.net). Wordle creates word frequency representations called word clouds. The larger a word appears within a cloud, the more frequently it occurs within a…

In the process of collecting assessment data in the author's introductory sociology course, he made a startling and disappointing discovery. For the most part, students simply were not bothering to read the basics version of the introductory survey textbook that he assigned. This discovery presented him with two related challenges. First, he had…