Making the most of Perusall (an introductory assignment)

There are multiple ways Perusall gives students the opportunity to have an optimum social learning experience. As you design your course, we suggest adding one of our scaffolding assignments. Go to the Library tab > Add content > Making the most of Perusall. 

The Making most of Perusall assignment is a short introductory assignment (about 30 minutes) designed to introduce students to social learning in Perusall, deepening their understanding of the material. This 30 minute assignment is designed to help students write high-quality comments while giving them a practice space to interact with classmates in a way that helps them and their peers. 

The introductory assignment consists of prompts interspersed throughout the content that students respond to. Under Disciplinary area select the one that best matches your course. Disciplines available: STEM, Humanities, and Social Sciences. 

When students work through the assignment, they won’t see their peers’ comments until they respond on their own. The introductory assignment auto populates prompts that will be posted under your name; you can always add, edit, or remove these prompts through the assignment. 

Feel free to also share one of our articles on writing good comments which reference high-quality comment examples. 

Dynamic Feedback

Another tool Perusall has created for students is providing dynamic feedback. As students work, they'll be given helpful tips by our little bookworm, Paige, to improve their work, answering the question for students of how to improve their score in a productive way, without instructor intervention.  Instructors can turn off this feature by going to Settings > Scoring > General > and select Disable dynamic suggestions for students on how to improve their score.

Students can see the dynamic feedback from Paige before entering the assignment or when they are inside the assignment and click on the assignment information icon on the right side tab. Also, if a student goes to the gradebook to view “my scores” they can click on their score and see a summary of the grade calculation.