Effectiveness of the Interactive Perusall Platform in Developing Critical Reading Skills of Middle School Students

Abstract

The current study aimed to determine the effectiveness of employing the interactive online platform Perusall in developing the critical reading skills of seventh grade students in the State of Qatar. To achieve the goal of the study, the researchers applied a questionnaire to curriculum and teaching methods experts in order to determine critical reading skills appropriate for seventh graders, and then apply the critical reading test to measure six skills: interpretation skill, cause-effect skill, the skill of detecting the author's bias and prejudice, and reading evaluation skill. The study sample consisted of (36) students from the seventh grade. They were divided into groups: the experimental group included (18) students and the control group included of ( 18) students. The subject unit was taught the experimental group students using the Perusall interactive platform. The subject unit was also taught to the control group students using the common traditional school method.The results of the study showed that there were statistically significant differences in the critical reading skills test between the experimental group and the control group in favor of the experimental group that used the Perusall platform in teaching. Through the findings, the researchers recommended conducting similar studies on a sample larger than the current study. They also recommended using Perusall platform to develop critical writing skills.

Empowering English Teachers to be Grammar ‘Experts’ and Coursebook Analysts via Perusall

“…Summing up the article by viewing this pedagogic innovation from a research perspective, I stress the following observation. Although there has been an increasing number of studies on the impact of Perusall on language-related learning, most of them centre around these areas: student engagement (Suhre et al, 2019), reading motivation (Li and Li, 2023), collaborative reading, reading skills development in general and critical thinking specifically in students in middle school (Issa et al, 2021) and in higher education (Cecchinato and Foschi, 2020; Fazza, 2021; Kohnke and Har, 2022; Lee and Yeong, 2018; Miller et al, 2018; Woodward and Neunaber, 2020). It would be pedagogically enriching if more attention were given to investigating students’ language gains in teacher education and language courses to examine how Perusall and other similar COAPs could promote literacy and reading skills development.…”

“…Comparing their relative effectiveness in promoting the critical reading of reference grammars and analyses of materials in textual, visual and multimodal forms via distance learning as suggested by recent studies (e.g. Issa et al, 2021; Kohnke and Har, 2022; Porter, 2022a, 2022b) and after hands-on practice, I pinned it down to Perusall. I found the user-friendly social annotation features on Perusall, its annotating functionalities going beyond the written text, its more social-media-type interface, the automatic flagging of questions and its upvoting tab supporting my pedagogic design.…”