Can I customize which questions my students can answer?

There are several options to customize your CommonLit assignment, depending on what activities you want your students to complete.

Looking to customize a CommonLit 360 lesson? Check out: How can I customize a CommonLit 360 reading lesson?

Customize the annotation task

All CommonLit assignments are automatically enabled with annotation tools. Students can annotate by adding notes or highlights to any assignment. 

We pre-fill a suggested annotation task for teachers on most assignments, but you can change the task when creating or editing the assignment.

Choose to enable Guided Reading Mode

CommonLit texts have a first layer of basic comprehension questions known as Guided Reading Mode. These basic comprehension questions help scaffold up towards more rigorous, standards-aligned assessment questions. Students get as many tries as they need to get Guided Reading Mode Questions right and are not penalized for missing questions. They get immediate feedback on their comprehension by using these multiple choice questions.

Guided Reading Mode chunks the text. Students cannot read beyond their active chunk. The next chunk of text will remain blurred out until they correctly answer the guiding question for the chunk they have just read.

Teachers can enable Guided Reading Mode when creating or editing an assignment. It can be assigned to all students on the assignment, or to a group of students. If you change your mind, forget to assign Guided Reading Mode, or want to remove it for a particular kid, you can edit the assignment at any time.

Choose which final Assessment Option to assign

Every CommonLit assignment comes with a set of standardized, rigorous final assessment questions. These can include multiple choice and short answer questions (most texts have both, but some only have one type).

Teachers can choose to assign all assessment questions (recommended), only multiple choice questions, only short answer questions, or no assessments question when creating an assignment. 

Teachers cannot edit this choice after creating an assignment, so choose carefully! CommonLit only lets you create one copy of an assignment in a class, so if you plan to work on multiple choice one day and short answer another day, choose to assign all assessment questions when you create the assignment.

Some sample lesson variations include:

• Assign only annotations
• Assign only annotations and Guided Reading Mode
• Assign annotations and all assessment questions
• Assign annotations and only multiple choice assessment questions
• Assign annotations and only short answer assessment questions
• Assign annotations, Guided Reading mode, and all assessment questions
• Assign annotations, Guided Reading Mode, and only multiple choice assessment questions
• Assign annotations, Guided Reading mode, and only short answer assessment questions
• Note: discussion questions, paired text questions, and related media are not digitally assignable at this time.