For engineering students to be able to effectively solve problems in their future profession, it is essential that they learn to reflect on their own learning, dissect their own thoughts, argue with themselves possible alternatives, and think about how their experiences will shape their future [1]. This process is referred to as metacognition – the awareness of one’s own thinking and learning [2]. It has therefore been proposed that active learning methods should not only encourage students to reflect on the content of learning, but also the process of learning [3]. Tanner [4] provides a good overview of different active learning methods that promote metacognition. One interesting method to promote the development of metacognitive skills is to let students write reflective diaries [5].
At the same time, reflective diaries allow for in-depth probing of student learning. One of the aims of engineering education research is to better understand students’ learning processes. It is therefore important to be able to collect data continuously, for example during a course, rather than at the end [6]. In contrast to observational data, revealing how students behave and interact, reflective diaries provide information about the students’ thoughts and reflections on situations – in some way similar to interviews, but closer to the moment that they occur [7]. Reflective diaries as a research method have been used predominately in health related studies, but also in educational research [8].
In this case study, we describe and evaluate the implementation of reflective diaries in a tissue engineering course in the Biotechnology Masters Program at Chalmers University of Technology. A central component of the course is an authentic research project, and reflective diaries were introduced to help the students to reflect on their project work as well as their own learning and development. The reflective diaries were also used as an important data source to study students’ learning pathways in the course [9]. The students got a set of prompts to write about at the end of each week. The prompts alternated between focusing on more general learning experiences and challenges (even weeks) and on the different phases of the project (odd weeks). By varying the prompts, we were able to provide different stimuli and avoid automation and fatigue in writing the reflective diaries [10]. We will use extracts from the reflective diaries and individual interviews with the students to demonstrate the development of metacognitive skills, discuss how students experienced writing reflective diaries and offer some pointers for implementing reflective diaries.
The advantage of the twin dimensions of reflective diaries, “promoting” and “probing”, is that they initially can be used to support student learning and subsequently provide teachers with a stepping-stone for engaging with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Reflective diaries are particularly well-suited for project-based courses, helping students to develop metacognitive skills and preparing them for future tasks by facilitating a transfer of learning from the project work. In addition, reflective diaries allow insight into the students’ work on the projects that is otherwise not visible to the teacher.
Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016