I’m one of those instructors who like to have students complete reading journals during the course of the semester. I tried it during the pandemic, but it didn’t work out nearly as well as I had hoped. Although if we’re being honest, very few things worked out as well during that first semester of COVID-19 as we hoped. We’ve iterated and improved.
I tried another version of journals (we’ll call that 2.0), only I made it far too easy for students to procrastinate. One student told me that they did all of their journals in a late night frenzy.
I think there’s a cognitive difference between writing up one’s thoughts in Word or another word processor vs. writing those thoughts in a discussion forum. I can’t prove that, of course, but perhaps it’s time to go looking in Communication Education or other academic journals to see whether that topic has been researched or not. There’s been research on note-taking that suggests that traditional paper and pencil helps students to retain more than would by typing in their notes, but that’s not the same as journaling.
Then again, I’ve been known to take notes with my iPad and Apple Pencil, which seems like the best of both worlds (the tactile memory and having an electronic, searchable copy of notes). The only problem is that requires an extra step or two in D2L (Desire to Learn, which is our learning management system). It’s honestly more convenient for students to upload to D2L and for me to grade in D2L instead of downloading the papers, marking up on my iPad, and then uploading the papers. I find that I miss not being able to use my iPad in this way. It’s easier to highlight the sentence or fragment that I want to respond to using a pencil than trying to use D2L’s highlighting function.
For version 3.0 of journaling, I decided to try using private discussion boards for journaling. There are a couple of tricks to doing it. Fortunately, it’s been written up and posted on the Internet in a few places. Vanderbilt’s website probably has the easiest version of the directions: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/brightspace/how-can-i-use-a-discussion-for-student-journaling-and-private-one-on-one-communication/
So how do I use these discussion forums?
- As a place for students to show me what they’ve taken from the readings.
- As a place for students to ask questions of me privately that they have about the readings (or other class material)
- To give students who don’t always feel comfortable sharing in class a place where they know their contributions will be read.
The downside is that it does take quite a bit of time to go through them… but in the end, I think that I understand my students better and know more about how they’re progressing through the class because I have these journals to reference. I don’t always respond to every journal entry. I try to enter responses for between 30-50% of them each class period. To be honest, I don’t know how well this system would work if I was teaching 5 classes each semester. But not every entry leads to a need to respond on my part (if the student is simply outlining the article, I won’t respond.).
I also don’t require students to turn in 100% of the journals in order to get an A. What I’m basically looking for is two things: (1) did they engage with the reading in some kind of meaningful way? and (2) do they show me what their strengths and weaknesses are with the material?