What Do Journal Assignments Teach Students?
by Salim M. Diab, John Bowers, and Jane Kobe, College of St. Francis (IL)
In the Fall semester of 1990, the English Department at our institution initiated a program in which faculty from different disciplines were encouraged to implement intensive writing assignments in their courses. Salim Diab volunteered to teach a science course for non-majors called "Chemistry and the Environment." Students in the course wrote journals, which he explained were different from diaries. Students were encouraged to view their journals as an intellectual exercise in which they would record their own experience with the content and explanations of it.
Diab hoped the journal assignment would accomplish several goals. He wanted students to be able to "apply" what they were learning to their own lives. He wanted to make their education personal. He also wanted a means of assessing student knowledge at a higher level of learning. Several instructional methods reinforced the importance of the journal. For example, students would write nonstop for 10 minutes at the beginning of the period on a topic pertaining to course content. A volunteer would then read his or her entry to the class. This exercise resulted in vigorous discussions and sometimes heated debates.
However two key questions remained in our minds:
· Did journal writing help the students learn the material better?
· Did journal writing help the students think better or differently about the material?
We decided to ask the students themselves these questions and have responses from 89 of them, representing students from four different sections of the course. In addition to comments we asked them to quantify their responses on a scale anchored at one end with "strongly agree" and with "strongly disagree" at the other end. In between were "agree" and "disagree" choices.
We were pleased to discover that 78% of the students strongly agreed or agreed that the assignment helped them learn the material, and 85% agreed or agreed that it increased their level of thinking about the material.
Among the favorable comments reported were observations like, "it helped me conceptualize the big picture," "excellent way to pull all the ideas together," and "it helped me reinforce the ideas that we talked about."
Not all the comments were positive. This is not an instructional strategy that works equally well for all students. However, our optimism about the potential merit of journal assignments has been confirmed by these reports. They raise for us a next question: Is there a correlation between students' performance and their attitudes about journal writing?