How do students feel about journaling assignments? This study is focused on students’ attitudes toward journaling. We’ll discuss data collected from before and after surveys administered to a class who participated in a summer study-away experience where students were prompted to engage in ongoing recursive reflection and produce daily public blog posts.
Historically, researchers have focused on the applicability and perceived benefits of using journaling to capture learning. But how do students feel about daily journaling during out-of-the-classroom engagement experiences? Do they view journaling as valuable or as drudgery? The presenters have spent a considerable amount of time
better understanding and advancing the use of journaling as an assessment tool for engagement (out-of-the-classroom) experiences, and in a recent study, we’ve asked students for their feedback.
For a summer 2022 study-away experience, students were required to submit eight blog posts (journal entries) related to their travel, including two pre-travel journal entries and one post-travel entry. During the study-away experience, students were provided prompts on five different topics and were instructed to choose from a different topic for each of four days, addressing 3-5 prompts in each 500-word-minimum post. A free-writing day was included, where students could freely reflect on their experiences on the trip as related to their individual final project proposals.
A literature review supports the idea that public blogs, with guided prompts, timely feedback, and a “real” audience (beyond the instructor) can aid students’ learning and cause writers to be thoughtful and careful when conveying their thoughts. Students in this study-away experience produced their journal entries as blog posts and were surveyed before and after the program about their attitudes and feelings toward this type of journaling and how it did or didn’t impact their learning. We were especially interested in whether students felt free to write without constraint, whether they appreciated well-wrought prompts, whether they preferred free-writing or not, and whether they thought that journaling helped them process new experiences and produced higher level learning, deep growth, and understanding. It is known that journaling can be helpful in developing metacognitive thinking by guiding students to process and express their experiences and associated thoughts. Guided reflection has the potential to help students engage more deeply with this 2022 short-term, study-away experience and to help them record their personal learning. The results of this study will help determine the use of future journaling assignments in this course and others like it.
Information gathered from the surveys will provide insight into students’ thoughts regarding the usefulness of journaling assignments. This is relevant for others looking to utilize journaling as an assessment tool.
Participants will engage in discussion surrounding our survey results, blog-style journaling vs. posts written solely for instructor eyes, and their own attitudes toward prompt-driven journaling versus freewriting.
Survey results will provide insights into students’ thoughts regarding journaling assignments.