Hypothesis for Student Success

Hypothesis is a digital annotation tool integrated with Canvas that supports both social and private assignments. Students highlight text, ask questions, and respond to peers, which improves comprehension and recall. The tool encourages closer reading and deeper engagement with the material, helping students monitor their understanding and identify areas needing clarification. Faculty report more engaged class discussions as students arrive having already processed complex ideas together.

Implementation Across Disciplines

Faculty across disciplines can use Hypothesis to promote close reading, critical analysis, and collaborative learning. The tool works with your selected text resource, including PDFs, web articles, video transcripts, and Canvas course pages, making it adaptable to diverse academic content and learning objectives. Examples of Hypothesis subjects aligned with academic areas:

Biology: Ask students to annotate cellular processes in research articles. While reading about photosynthesis, prompt: "Highlight the rate-limiting step and explain why this creates a metabolic bottleneck."
History: Use primary source annotation for critical analysis. After reading Frederick Douglass's narrative, ask: "Annotate three rhetorical strategies Douglass uses to challenge slavery and explain their effectiveness."
Marketing: Promote strategic thinking through case study annotation. While reading about brand failures, prompt: "Highlight the critical decision point and propose an alternative strategy with justification."
Health Professions: Apply diagnostic reasoning through case study annotation. While reading patient presentations, prompt: "Highlight the key symptoms that suggest a specific condition and justify your differential diagnosis."
Philosophy: Promote critical thinking through argument mapping. Students can annotate philosophical texts to identify premises, conclusions, and logical fallacies, engaging in Socratic dialogue within the margins of works by Aristotle or Kant.
Writing: Build proofreading expertise using sample texts with embedded errors. Students highlight spelling mistakes, grammatical problems, and unclear sentences, then propose revisions. Prompt: "Locate 5 errors and annotate your corrective feedback."

What the Research Says

Integrating social annotation with evidence-based teaching transforms reading from a solitary activity into collaborative knowledge construction:

Collaborative social annotation tools facilitate meaningful peer interaction and deeper cognitive engagement with texts, improving student understanding (Diyarova, 2024).
Critical questions in social annotation environments significantly improve perspective-taking quality in written dialogue, with participants demonstrating 1.97 times higher odds of achieving higher-level perspective taking compared to control groups (Nishiyama & Nussbaum, 2025).
Collaborative annotation tools capture students' thinking and processing in the moment, more closely mirroring face-to-face classroom learning where students can discuss content with instructors and classmates in real-time (Adams & Wilson, 2020).
Social annotation through Hypothesis enabled students to come to class better prepared, allowing instructors to focus on solving more challenging problems and real-world applications rather than covering basic material during lecture time (Perera, Brenneise & Brown).