Margot Volem is an instructor of English at the University of Idaho. She holds an M.Ed. TESOL from Seattle University. 

I have long observed in my teaching practice that the most memorable learning tends to occur after students are able to pinpoint gaps in their own knowledge or understanding of course material. Put another way: failure is an effective teacher. However, many college-level courses are delivered in a mode of instruction traditional to higher education: lectures followed by summative assessments, such as term papers or exams. The feedback students receive is delivered and received not as an opportunity for reflection or further inquiry but as a final, definitive grade.  

In my general education literature class, a 100-level course called “Literature & Ideas,” I’ve built a variety of formative activities into the curriculum—journal entries, small group and class discussions, quizzes, close readings—but the bulk of the course grade is determined by three summative exams (one for each unit: fiction, poetry, drama) and a capstone writing project, a literary analysis essay. This year, I began using the digital tools that accompany The Norton Introduction to Literature, Fifteenth Edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays—including the courseware learning tools InQuizitive and Close Reading Workshops—as a way to provide low-stakes feedback to students. These tools also provide other benefits; for example, the data they aggregate help me plan group activities to support students struggling with the course material.  

The Norton courseware learning tools can be easily incorporated—in my case, with the patient guidance of a Norton Customer Success Manager—into a Learning Management System (LMS), such as Blackboard or Canvas, where they can be used alongside the ebook version of the textbook. InQuizitive comprises adaptive activities, including a variety of question types such as multiple choice, multiselect, and matching in which students drag and drop responses and receive feedback in real time, whereas the Close Reading Workshops provide students with practice for writing through a critical lens. Because there are not InQuizitive activities and Close Reading Workshops for every text in the anthology, I spent some time going through them before the start of the semester and planning my syllabus around what was available and conducive to what I wanted to teach.  

While both InQuizitive and the Close Reading Workshops can be set up as graded assignments, I decided to make them ungraded and strictly participation based. That is, students’ grades are negatively affected only if they do not do an activity; as long as they complete the activities, they receive full points regardless of their actual score. The Close Reading Workshops are already designed this way: students who work their way through all of the prompts receive full points. But I find it useful to use the InQuizitive activities in this way, too, so that students focus more on the content and less on the grade. 

InQuizitive’s engaging question types that go beyond just multiple choice are designed with helpful pop-up windows that provide definitions for literary terms, so a student can quickly be reminded of the difference between allusion and alliteration, for example, or allegory and myth. The most helpful feature is that students are provided feedback in real time and allowed multiple attempts at questions they answer incorrectly, giving them insight into what they do not yet know or may have misunderstood. To return to my initial point: meaningful learning often occurs when a gap in knowledge is filled, or a misconception is corrected. InQuizitive activities provide just that, at a pace set by each individual learner. One clear benefit to assigning an InQuizitive activity to accompany a reading is that students engage with the reading more thoroughly prior to coming to class to take a quiz or participate in a group discussion. They are more confident of what they know, they are more willing to participate in class discussions, and their questions are more reflective of what they still find confusing.   

Whereas the InQuizitive activities provide self-guided learning and feedback in real time, the Close Reading Workshops provide students practice for writing through a critical lens. For example, one prompt asks students to identify potentially significant features of a reading and, when articulating that idea, to use the specific language “___________ is potentially significant because….” This practice is useful in helping students to move beyond the right-or-wrong answers of the multiple-choice tests many were accustomed to in high school and to begin to develop the analytical writing and critical-thinking skills expected at the college level.   

The other section of the Close Reading Workshops that I find useful to my teaching practice is one that asks students to articulate what they still find confusing about a particular passage of a short story, poem, or play. Their answers provide a blueprint for my next lecture or class activity. Often their insights bring to light details I had missed, and these details further enrich class discussions, highlighting one of the strengths of general education: collaborative group learning. For example, because I knew one student had made a particularly profound remark about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I could call on her in class and ask her to articulate the idea for her peers.  

Although the Close Reading Workshops provide very helpful teacher feedback, it is more time consuming to read the individual student responses these invite than to look at the aggregated data (scores) from the InQuizitive activities. In my class of 35, I assign five Close Reading Workshops during the semester, making them due on Fridays so that I have the weekend to read student responses and prepare for Monday’s class. This practice makes my lectures more relevant to the specific needs of my students, as I am able to address issues in comprehension that arise for multiple students and to home in on particularly interesting insights, which also come directly from my students. There is more consistency overall when each student tackles the same questions regarding the same passage and practices formulating responses in a similar fashion. Moreover, as the semester progresses, students are more primed to begin approaching literary texts with the questions the Close Reading Workshops pose. This helps to steer students away from the binary thinking of “like” versus “dislike” and to shape the discourse around thinking about what is meaningful, significant, or relevant to the humanistic and artistic expression of short stories, poems, or plays they are engaging with. 

In addition to informing my lectures, InQuizitive and Close Reading Workshops also give me insights helpful for arranging students into groups for class activities and groupwork to provide the most student support. Because the tools organize the data via a class activity report, it is possible to see quickly (and without the tedious task of grading) which students are excelling and which are struggling. I often use this information to arrange students into groups prior to class. Sometimes I might pair two strong students with two weaker ones; other times, I might put five students I knew were all struggling in the same group, and then I would spend class time working with that group while the groups of stronger students worked independently. This allows me to provide remediation for weaker students rather than letting them slip through the cracks.   

Overall, I have found the Norton courseware tools to be well worth the time it takes to invest in learning how to use them effectively. Even for the technology-averse, the learning curve is gentle. And the benefits to the students may be well worth it. With teaching, you never know what is going to stick. If InQuizitive activities or Close Reading Workshops make the pieces fall into place, even for a handful of students, then I want those pedagogical tools in my bag of tricks.   

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