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…

In this article, the author describes utilizing Instagram as a reading response activity in an undergraduate English course to increase student engagement with challenging texts. Using a shared class account, students created a menu of prompts that they then chose from to create posts after reading fictional, theoretical, and philosophical texts;…

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…

We investigate student listening compliance, preference for audio versus print content, and exam performance when professionally produced podcasts are assigned as "readings" and provided in both audio and print formats. Listening/reading compliance for the assigned podcasts was high compared with figures reported in previous research.…

The author of this article describes an intermediate economics course structured around outside readings, which include academic journal papers, policy briefs, and news articles. Students complete low-stakes, high-frequency writing assignments that promote accountability and encourage critical thinking about the readings. This pairing of outside…

The past 10 years have seen a major shift in English and English as a Second Language (ESL) placement and pedagogy in California's Community Colleges (CCC), driven by a developmental education reform movement known as acceleration. Popularized by the faculty-led California Acceleration Project (CAP), the acceleration movement focused on reducing…

In the United States, there is a demand for registered nurses. To be admitted into the nursing program, students need to complete prerequisite courses such as human anatomy and physiology. Many students find human anatomy and physiology challenging due to the nature of the content. Poor performance in human anatomy and physiology can preclude a…

Journal clubs are widely used as an educational tool in graduate life science programs. In journal clubs, students are assigned to read specific journal articles to achieve a broad knowledge in their field of study and to gain competence in reading and assessing scientific publications. However, students often show low motivation to read assigned…

The flipped classroom has the potential to improve student performance. Because flipping involves both preclass preparation and problem solving in the classroom, the means by which increased learning occurs and whether the method of delivering content matters is of interest. In a partially flipped cell biology course, students were assigned online…

This article describes a four-part book club in a political parties, campaigns, and elections course. Self-reported survey data and anecdotal evidence suggest that the book club was a successful learning tool. Specifically, students who enrolled in the book club reported increased classroom capital, significant learning, enjoyment with the book…

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…

Engaging students in completing assigned reading material, particularly textbooks, is a challenge faced by many college professors. Further, research has demonstrated student compliance is typically low with reading course textbooks. This study explores the impact of assigning content-specific books written for popular audiences and having…

When students are offered choices within assignments it increases buy-in and, therefore, motivation toward the task--and ultimately for the class itself. As a professor in an academic setting in which many millennials seem to be suffering from a persistent lack of motivation, it was a no-brainer for the author to consider creating a way to offer…

Although L2 reading is traditionally framed as an individual enterprise, digital annotation tools (DATs) have recently been developed allowing groups of readers to collaborate and provide mutual scaffolding through collective annotation of texts (Blyth, 2014; Thoms, Sung, & Poole, 2017). These tools reframe L2 reading as an interactive process…