Literacy’s Schrödinger’s cat: capturing reading comprehension with social annotation

What a multi‐institutional collective case study of social annotation data reveals about graduate students' metacognitive reading practices

“…Across the 363 annotations analysed, researchers assigned 389 codes (Table 3). Our findings extend insights found in Adams and Wilson (2022) and Adams et al (2023) and are generalisable across five higher education contexts. The following section articulates our findings regarding graduate students' comprehension strategy use and community engagement when using a social annotation tool while reading academic texts (Table 3).…”

“…Bakermans et al (2022) found that using Perusall helped reduce implicit biases found in traditional classroom discussions, and we hope the same is true for our teaching contexts. This study matters because it extends earlier findings (Adams et al, 2022, 2023; Adams & Wilson, 2020, 2022) beyond a single institution to multiple institutions in every region of the United States. It may prompt educators across the globe to ask questions that could lead to future research and provide implications for practice.…”

“…Prior to analysing the theoretically sampled participant data, the entire research group practised coding together. We used a pre‐established codebook (Table 2) that identified key behaviours related to comprehension strategies and community (Adams et al, 2023). We revised it to better ascertain degrees of utility or efficacy in order to capture the progression of strategy application.…”

“…Reading comprehension is a complex process that occurs in the head and thus has always been difficult to assess as well as instruct (Adams et al, 2023; Pearson, 2004). This study was designed around the belief that readers actively construct meaning during the reading process by engaging in metacognition to apply a variety of reading comprehension strategies.…”

“…Prior studies that inform this work include evaluating communities of practice formed within social annotation spaces (Adams & Wilson, 2020), investigating whether and how critical literacies emerge and transfer during reading annotation (Adams et al, 2022; Ku & Ho, 2010), a broad examination of comprehension strategies employed by graduate students when annotating professional texts (Adams & Wilson, 2022) and deeper examinations of individual practices with regard to comprehension strategies, critique and community interaction (Adams et al, 2023; Johnson et al, 2010; Novak et al, 2012).…”