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Student Journals are a chronicle that students can keep as they engage in hands-on/minds-on activities. The journals can take many forms and give lecturers an assessment of students’ cognitive processes. Pros Journals can be used as a tool to enhance and encourage students’ higher-level thinking. The use of journals and notebooks in the science classroom allows lecturers, and students, to assess student understandings of facts and concepts over a period of time. It also enables lecturers to assess students’ familiarity with science procedures and processes, as well as their attitudes towards science. Journals also enable students to become more familiar with their own ideas and concepts, and how they change over a period of time. Teaching Strategies and Tips Use a model to ensure that students are aware of what is expected of them in their writings. Lecturers should try to respond to entries on a regular basis. Frequently enough to let the students know that their work is important and that it is being read. Variations A - Students’ science dictionaries Keep an individual dictionary in which the students can record new words growing out of their hands-on/minds-on activities, and research the origins of interesting science words. B - Four-phase journal: pre-investigation, investigation, post-investigation, and communication. During the pre-investigation phase, students describe the purpose of the day’s experiment, write their predictions, and then plan their approach. This allows the student to become focussed on the task. In the investigation phase, students organize their data, reflect on their prior knowledge, and record new ideas as they occur. The post-investigation phase involves interpretation of, explanation of, and reflection on their findings, and the use of a KWL strategy, in which they record what they Knew, what they Wanted to learn, and what they Learned. Students can also create concept maps and charts during this phase. The final phase is the communication phase, in which students are required to create a product from the investigation (or at least describe one) that could be used to help them communicate their understandings to someone else. The product can be in the form of a presentation, article, poster, poem, song, and so on. Adapted from: Ebenezer, Haggerty. Becoming a secondary School Science Teacher. (1999) Prentice Hall pp. 353 - 355 C - Personal Reflective Journals and Logs Self-reflection or self-awareness is at the heart of the learning process. It is the key to helping students grasp the personal implications of what they are studying. One of the best ways to provide the lecturer with the opportunity to read between the lines is to encourage students to keep reflective journals or logs to help them be aware of their thoughts, feelings, learning, questions, and ideas. Writing in the thinking log may take many forms. It may be a narrative, a quote, an essay, jotting, a drawing, a cartoon, a diagram, webs or clusters, a riddle, a joke, doodles, an opinion, a dialogue, a letter, a flowchart, or just an assortment of phrases and ideas. Entries may be reflective, evaluative, questioning, personal, abstract, introspective, cynical, incomplete, revealing, humorous, communicative, thoughtful, rambling, formative, philosophical, or none of the above. There are no right or wrong answers to do the log. It's just a log of one's thinking - whatever that thinking might be. (148) Adapted from: Lazear, David. (1999) Multiple Intelligence Approaches to Assessment. Solving the Assessment Conundrum. USA: Zephyr Press. pp. 148 - 153
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