reading strategies

NotebookLM–Assisted Annotated Bibliography

Salma Kalim Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This multi-step assignment invites students to compare their own scholarly reading practices with AI-generated analyses within the context of annotated bibliography writing. By incorporating NotebookLM—a document-grounded research tool—students engage in a guided exchange with artificial intelligence as they draft, revise, and refine their understanding of academic sources. […]

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Acting Bias: Staging Media Analysis in First-Year Writing

Freddie (Fiona) Harris Ramsby Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In first-year writing classrooms, embodied teaching methods, such as Kathryn Dawson and Bridget Kiger Lee’s drama-based pedagogy (DBP), “[provide] an innovative means to stimulate students’ creativity…to foster learning that sticks, cultivating brains that retain information” (Harris Ramsby 1). Combining Newman P. Birk and Genevieve B.

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Reading Against the Machine

Scott DeLoach Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description In this activity, students practice using generative AI tools as reading partners while strengthening their metacognitive awareness through the Reading Apprenticeship framework. Reading Apprenticeship is a framework that supports students in developing expert reading habits by making thinking processes visible and shared. It integrates four key dimensions

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Literary Analysis via Songs

Sean Oros Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this lesson is to provide students a pathway for applying literary analysis skills to modern songs of their own choosing. The rationale for this is twofold: first, it is partially a response to avoiding copied responses from Spark Notes or Lit Notes and the

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“Read, Feed, and Seed”: Fostering Research Writing in Classroom Spaces

Mustafa Masihuddin Siddiqui Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description During my first two terms teaching first-year composition classes at the University of Toronto, I faced multiple problems—my classes were not engaging enough; many of the students’ essays did not showcase deep understanding of the key course readings; some students did not apply the evidence into

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“Are Cats Good? An Important Study”: Using a Meme Article for Teaching Writing of Analytic Summaries

Wei Xu and Hongni Gou Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity is designed as part of the major project “Annotated Bibliography” in a first-year writing course. At the time the activity is implemented, students should have learned the purpose, context, and audience of an annotated bibliography and that both summaries and evaluations are

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“Getting a Peek Behind the Wizard’s Curtain”: Teaching Students How to Read Academic Articles with Haas’ ‘Learning to Read Biology’

Kevin E. DePew Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description As instructors across the disciplines know, most incoming college students struggle to read academic texts. While there is an array of reasons that students might not be reading their assigned texts—from limited time to neurodivergent challenges to failure to see the assigned reading’s relevance—this series of

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Deep Digital Reading with Google Docs

Ashley R. Ott Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description “Books and screens are now bound up with one another whether we like it or not. Only in patiently working through this entanglement will we be able to understand how new technologies will, or will not, change how we read” (Piper ix). Digital reading offers new

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Dramatizing the Conversation: Creating Dialogue Scripts to Support Source Synthesis

Kim Fahle Peck Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Kenneth Burke’s famous parlor metaphor presents a picture of academic research as a conversation between ideas and perspectives: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too

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Unpacking Abstracts: Conventions of Empirical Abstracts in Social Science Papers

Faqryza Ab Latif Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The goal of the activity is for learners to be able to describe the components that make up the abstract of an empirical social science paper and apply them to other abstracts in the field. This goal is connected to introducing students to the conventions of

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