Social reading does it develop students engagement with

Social reading: does it develop students’ engagement with scholarly resources? Alison Sharman Academic Librarian

Background to the study, context and rationale • Second year English module “introduction to critical and cultural theory” • Module comprises 2 core text books and three further books to analyse • Engagement with the text is shallow • No spare class time for further discussion

Tutor intervention • Plans for guided peer/social reading of articles chapter on a weekly basis • Model the kind of academic practices to which the tutor would like the students to aspire • Voluntary activity

Social reading platform required • Needs to be behind a firewall to allow class discussion with no external intervention • Integration with an e. Reader • Allows annotations and comments to be made at text level • Possible solutions: Yammer; e. Margin; Digress. it; Goodreads and Readmill applications

Social Reading • The idea is relatively new and being progressed at other universities, e. g. Hertfordshires Living Reading List ; University of Leicester’s #tagginganna project • Social Annotation software tools: allow comments and discussions to be framed around specific sections of text, (Novak et al, 2012)

Aims of the project • Centralised around 4 research questions 1. Which technology should be chosen for the project and why? 2. Is it suitable for the project? 3. Did the use of the tehcnology and participation in the project help students develop their engagement with scholarly sources? 4. Did the project help with the development of higher order academic skills?

Summary of the project plan • • Decide on research aims Literature review Identify suitable research methods Decide on technology to be used Instructional workshop with students Project takes place Gather data

Summary of the project plan • Findings • Conclusion • Write-up

Methodology • Evaluation study: Robson (2011) suggests a multi strategy design using a combination of fixed and flexible design • Data collected using qualitative and quantitative methodologies • Will not use a control group : comparison with non volunteers wouldn’t produce a reliable outcome

Triangulation • Ensure academic rigour and validity of findings by using triangulation – Results from one method checked against results from another (Denscombe, 2010; Mc. Neill and Chapman, 2005; Robson, 2011) – Balance strengths and weaknesses of different methods (Denzin, 2010 cited in Denscombe, 2010)

Methods • Observation: help eradicate discrepancies between what participant say they will do and the behaviour they exhibit • Unstructured interviews: can change questions and structure if interesting point is made (Mc. Neill and Chapman, 2005) • Questionnaire: anonymous so hope to get data that I couldn’t gather in other 2 methods. Can measure emotions and strength of feeling