Crowdsourced Reading: Developing Critical Reading Skills via Digital Worksheets
Abstract
This presentation will focus on an experimental reading assignment given to my sophomore art theory seminar at Whittier College. Finding that students in past semesters were either not doing the reading or engaging in “surface reading”, I created a digitally based worksheet that was used for two distinct purposes: 1) To force students to use higher-order thinking skills when reading (rather than focus on memorization and recall) and 2) To crowdsource data about the reading and use this data to spark student-centered discussion about the text. My presentation will focus on the following main points: 1. the rationale behind the assignment (surface vs. deep reading) 2. Digital worksheet design which will include the use of Moodle and the weaving of higher-order thinking skills into the worksheet. 3. The aggregation and visualization of crowdsourced data collected from the worksheet. This visualization primarily focuses on the creation of word clouds and charts. 4. The use of the data visualizations to foster student-centered discussions in class. Example of how the digital worksheet is used: One section of the worksheet asks students to choose the 10 most important vocabulary words in the text and then rank them in order of importance. These vocabulary words are collected via the worksheet on Moodle and visualized using Tagxedo before class. The word cloud is then used at the beginning of the class to spark conversation about the text. At the end of class and after extensive discussion, the word cloud is once again seen and evaluated on its accuracy. The word cloud comparison then sparks a new set of discussions.
Session
Session 5A. Blending to Promote Active, Collaborative Reading
Location
Dalton 300
Start Date
5-21-2015 9:00 AM
End Date
5-21-2015 10:15 AM
Crowdsourced Reading: Developing Critical Reading Skills via Digital Worksheets
Dalton 300
This presentation will focus on an experimental reading assignment given to my sophomore art theory seminar at Whittier College. Finding that students in past semesters were either not doing the reading or engaging in “surface reading”, I created a digitally based worksheet that was used for two distinct purposes: 1) To force students to use higher-order thinking skills when reading (rather than focus on memorization and recall) and 2) To crowdsource data about the reading and use this data to spark student-centered discussion about the text. My presentation will focus on the following main points: 1. the rationale behind the assignment (surface vs. deep reading) 2. Digital worksheet design which will include the use of Moodle and the weaving of higher-order thinking skills into the worksheet. 3. The aggregation and visualization of crowdsourced data collected from the worksheet. This visualization primarily focuses on the creation of word clouds and charts. 4. The use of the data visualizations to foster student-centered discussions in class. Example of how the digital worksheet is used: One section of the worksheet asks students to choose the 10 most important vocabulary words in the text and then rank them in order of importance. These vocabulary words are collected via the worksheet on Moodle and visualized using Tagxedo before class. The word cloud is then used at the beginning of the class to spark conversation about the text. At the end of class and after extensive discussion, the word cloud is once again seen and evaluated on its accuracy. The word cloud comparison then sparks a new set of discussions.