Use of a reflection journal in a third year engineering project course

Abstract

As part of a new third year project course for the Electrical Engineering program, a reflection journal was introduced as part of the work to be undertaken by students. The aim of the one term course is to provide a project experience that will provide design experience in teams, will draw together material from the previous years of academic study as well as further prepare students for their capstone project. The reflection journal has been introduced to provide a regular opportunity for the student to consciously reflect on their progress, challenges encountered, as well as a way to develop their writing skills. This is an attempt to encourage students to look at the process of learning in a project environment and to develop some degree of metacognition1. By undertaking this type of reflection Cowan [1] suggests that this assists students from looking at solving a particular challenge to generalizing the problem solving process, fitting with the objectives of aproject course. The entries for the journal are weekly and are assessed each week by an instructor and contributed to 15% of the final mark. Because this form of assessment would be new to most of the students instructions were provided including a rubric. These instructions as well asthe instructor’s experiences and opinion of the success of the journal will be presented.