Social Annotation for Engaged Reading and Peer Review

Any courses requiring outside-of-class readings, particularly those offered through learning management software (e.g. ELMS), will benefit from more engagement with material. Classes requiring writing or other projects that use peer review can increase student interaction around the development of these assignments. Students, particularly post-pandemic, are reading less outside of the classroom and reporting difficulty with reading assignments of any length. Concurrently, the ruthless efficiency of AI has allowed students to get used to having reading assignments summarized for them. Students speed through texts with a checklist approach, rather than reading critically and actively. Social annotation is one way to slow students down and collaboratively engage in active reading. This approach makes for more substantive peer review as well, since students are translating skills developed in assessing and discussing course material to critiquing each other’s work.