Student Weekly Reflective Report

An article by Darin Wagner    No Comments

Consider having your students construct a weekly learning report. A colleague shared this idea for a reflective exercise that can also work as a course study guide for the students in the end.

To begin, ask the students to respond to these three prompts weekly:

1. What did I learn this week?
2. What is still unclear?
3. Create and solve a sample test question.

Answering the first question, What did I learn this week?, can help you discover what it is that the students really did learn this week. Use this feedback to reflect and revise your instructional strategies.

By responding to the second question, What is still unclear?, students will let you know what other content, concepts, or practice is still necessary before moving to the next learning topic.

Finally, if students can create and solve a sample test question, they are engaging with the material on a deeper level. By sharing these questions with each other and/or the class, they are working collaboratively to improve their understanding of the content.

Like anything, the more thought and effort the students put into this process, the better the results will be for them.

Now, how do we integrate a little technology into the process? If you are using Moodle, or another learning management system, you could…

• create an assignment for uploading a Word document
• start a discussion board for each week
• use a journal for private communications between the student and teacher

Further, there are a number of online services for creating a survey response, such as Google Docs, PollDaddy, etc. that could be used to collect their responses.