On The Benefits of Using A Learning Journal Assignment In Technical Undergraduate Courses

In higher education, undergraduate technical courses tend to focus mainly on the technical content and use assessment tools to measure how well the students do with the technical knowledge/skills. In addition, students’ evaluations of instructors and courses happen at the end of a semester, which provide some valuable feedback to the instructors to apply in their next offerings. However, these are too late for the current offering. This leads to two problems: First, the students know that they will not benefit from the evaluations and tend to offer very little feedback and second, the instructors do not have a clue about how their students are feeling about the course and if they have any issues. Therefore, we introduced a new assignment geared to gather feedback from the students during the semester. We added a learning journal assignment requiring students to answer specific prompts about their learning, interests, issues and feedback every week. It is a graded low-stake assignment thus students can complete it without fear of negatively affecting their grades. Over several applications of this assignment in different engineering and computing courses we found the following: (1) Students’ interest in the course sessions and content has increased; (2) Students became more open and were able to express their needs more easily in the privacy of the jo0urnal entries; (3) Instructors were able to catch learning problems early and address them in class in real-time; (4) Students’ evaluations of these courses improved significantly. As instructors we see this method as a valuable and interactive feedback mechanism that help us improve our teaching, address problems quickly, and adjust to specific students’ needs on a continuous basis.