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Reading journals: a versatile assessment strategy.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Reading journals can be used in a variety of ways to encourage students to read more reflectively and to develop skills in communicating their understanding. While normally used as an individualistic assessment strategy, incorporating regular feedback and a collaborative element can enhance student performance.

Introduction

How best to encourage undergraduate students to read widely, wisely and well is a constant challenge for university teachers and one that can be complicated by students' varying family and employment commitments, time management strategies, and prior experience of tertiary education. Assessed reading journals offer one solution. Easily adapted in scope and scale, this commonplace teaching and learning strategy can be easily adjusted to work effectively at both graduate and undergraduate levels and with outcomes that link directly to recommended teaching practice about providing on-going developmental feedback (Hyland, 2000). The case study below demonstrates how the strategy can be used in ways not usually canvassed in the literature on journals, logs and diaries (Moon, 1999; Gibbs, 1995). It suggests that both learning and employability objectives can be achieved through a flexible system that accords well with recognized goals of assessing for understanding (Ramsden, 2003).

A second-year level example

The most straightforward use of a reading journal is as a record of a student's independent or assigned reading, preferably with a strong reflective component. In a introductory course on Victorian Britain, for example, a group of some sixty students accessed, read and annotated a range of published resource material. Locating contemporary newspapers and periodicals, parliamentary debates and official reports extended the students' literacy information skills. Other categories, such as monographs, scholarly and popular articles, websites, novels, biographies and a richly-illustrated 'coffee table 'publication, were relatively easy for most students to uncover but occasional small group or full class discussion on 'favorite finds' was a useful way of sharing search strategies and promoting a sense of collective endeavor amongst students who had little previous tertiary experience of passing useful references on to others.

For many undergraduates in that class, it was a novel experience to be involved in developing both the assignment specifications and the assessment criteria. Small group discussion in the first week of teaching soon elicited a list of twelve types of sources that could be explored; identifying the key criteria for assessment was more difficult. Most groups could agree more readily on the relatively mechanical aspects (such as accuracy of referencing and standard of proof-reading) than on the more substantive ways in which a 100-word annotation might be assessed. There was little understanding about the scope and structure of an annotation, hence student hesitation about how best to evaluate one. Examples of informative annotations, adapted from Library Choice cards,...

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