Reflections on using journals in higher education: a focus group discussion with faculty
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reflective journals have become an increasingly popular tool used by numerous faculty across many disciplines in higher education. Previous research and narrative reports of journal writing have explored student perceptions of journal writing, but very little is understood about faculty perceptions. In this paper, we report on a study involving eight university faculty who teach courses with outdoor field components in the areas of outdoor recreation, experiential education, or outdoor education. We present the faculty member’s: (1) current practices of journal writing (types of journals, types of entries, process of journal writing), (2) perceptions of journal writing (rationale, quality, evaluation) and (3) recommendations to maximize the potential of journal writing. A mixed methods approach was used that included a 32‐item quantitative questionnaire and a focus group discussion. By and large, the faculty who participated in this study appreciated the pedagogical potential of journal writing. They were, however, cautious about certain aspects of the journaling process and offered numerous suggestions for improving the ‘journaling experience.’ This paper concludes with several recommendations for consideration by higher education faculty who use journal writing as an instructional technique.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it