The current generation of college students is on a quest for meaningful knowledge and relevance in learning, and educators are continually challenged to meet these needs. Students will no longer accept the necessity of learning copious amounts of technical and scientific information "just because." Faculty often attempt to provide relevance by presenting real-world examples, but even these are not "real" to a student who fails to identify the connection or usefulness of the subject. During the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 academic years, we implemented a simple, weekly reflective journal assignment in our first year, project-based engineering design course, which consists of three questions: What did you learn? Why is it important for you to learn it? How else could you use it, in other courses, work or home (be specific)? The fifty students in each semester's course described one or more skills and reflections for each week of the semester, and received grades and feedback every 2-4 weeks. In addition to allowing students to identify what they learned and its relevance (thereby reinforcing skills and insights and promoting their retention), we were able to determine particular skills or insights throughout the course that students found to be useful in some of their other courses taken concurrently. Not only does repetition promote retention, but the use of a particular piece of knowledge or skill in more than one course further emphasizes its importance to the student. Final grades and reflective journal data have been evaluated for five cohorts. Three of the cohorts completed reflective journal assignments, and two did not, the latter serving as a control group. We identified the following research questions, in order to determine the effect of this type of reflective journal on overall student learning in our course: 1. Is there a difference in final course grades between students who completed the reflective journal assignments and those who did not? 2. Is the relationship between course grades and reflective learning the same for men and women? 3. Does this practice of reflective learning correlate to individual improvement in course assignment grades over the course of the semester? Final grades for the course were determined through two individual assignments (20% of the final grade), and five team assignments (40% of the final grade), where every team member receives the same grade. The remaining 40% consisted of a combination of individual- and team-based grades: reflective journal, peer evaluation, mentor evaluation, and engineering graphics. Because assignments in engineering graphics contribute 20% to the final grade, and were graded on a pass/fail basis, we compared student performance both with and without the graphics grades. On an overall basis, we have not found a dramatic difference in course grades, both with and without the reflective journal assignment and when graphics grades are included. However, there are differences among men and women students that more or less offset one another; i.e., women's grades increased and men's grades decreased by similar amounts. When graphics grades are not included, overall student performance in final course grades increases with the inclusion of the journal assignment, and increases for women but not for men. Results for individual improvement in course assignment grades over the course of the semester are inconclusive. We suspect that this result occurs because only two individual project-based assignments, nine weeks apart, can be compared directly.
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