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Keeping
a Journal as a Scientific Tool
Introduction
This outline doesn’t
present a complete packaged approach to writing, but rather presents
elements of science writing programs you may wish to include in
your classroom, or to enhance activities you already do on a regular
basis. If students really feel comfortable writing in their journals,
it’s a great way to see what they really understand in a way
that doesn’t come out on tests or in class. My goal for this
outline is to present enough options that every student will have
at least one opportunity to really engage their curiosity through
the journal.
What are the justifications
for using the journal in your classrooms? How can you keep it from
being a "fuzzy" time-consuming activity? How can "writing-to-learn"
strategies increase your students' participation and improve their
fundamental comprehension of what you're teaching? Here's my version
of the answers to these important questions.
- The basis of any scientific
theory is observation. In any scientific discovery, one observes
a correlation between two factors. The next step is to imagine
a process that allows the two factors to correlate. Therefore
the best authority in science is the student's own powers of observation,
not the authority of scientists, teachers, or textbooks.
- Science is used as
a justification for many widely held beliefs, and some of these
beliefs are politically charged or contentious. Consider some
of the justifications for vegetarianism or the use of animals
as medical models in biotech testing and research.
- There's also a ciritical
paradox of our first world, western, developed culture: we are
increasingly dependent upon technological and scientific understandings
of our world around us, and yet many of us are not comfortable
with the methods of science. The Kansas example (eliminating the
required teachings of evolution in the public school classsroom)
perfectly describeds this deeply held mistrust. Science is not
an encyclopedic database into which "facts" are entered. Science
is the ongoing use of humanity's ability to observe, record and
infer from visible processes. To go even further, science is a
method of pullling out meaningful lessons from observed phenomenon.
The journal is also a
useful tool for getting students to write out their current beliefs
and understandings of scientific processes before you teach
the material. By having the students state their (mis)conceptions
of science, you have the abaility to enhance their learning when
you provide the scientifically accepted version of the process.
An example of this is given in the film " A Private Universe." The
high school students in this documentary are asked to provide explanantions
for commonly occuring processes, such as the phases of the moon.
By having the students become aware of what the think is
happening, the teacher can then exactly address the student's version
of the process. In one example, a student believes that a variable
cloud cover is responsible for the phase changes in the moon's appearance.
Because the teacher knows this is the private understanding of this
student, she can include this topic in her general comments to the
class.
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What Are the Goals of
Writing?
Scientists write in order
to document actions and to qualify changes when those occur. The
process of science is to convert unknown objects into known objects.
This means discerning variables in all processes: from protein assembly
within cells to astronomical observations. Students can and should
be exposed to unmediated experience with unknown objects. Images
and illustrations are an important aspect of the science journal.
Consider a science article first without and then with the accompanying
illustration. Without illustrating what concepts are being conveyed,
scientific text is difficult to understand.
An activity for your
classrooms: The unknown
object box is a shoebox filled with a collection of common household
object, and students can shake, rattle or drop the box in order
to make a hypothesis as to what’s inside. Distribute one unknown
object box, for each group of student participants. These groups
of 3 to 4 work for 10 minutes to come up with a hypothesis for the
contents. All of this is done without opening the
box. Each group then makes a public statement about what they think
is in the box, and list a percent certainty for each item. (A group
might feel 10% certain there’s a rubber band inside the box,
but they’re 90% sure that there’s a cat collar with a
bell inside the box.) Once the students open the box, they have
the opportunity to test their hypotheses for themselves. A method
of enhancing this exercise is to have the students make two columns
of knowledge claims. In one column are the aspects of the items
inside the box that they can make claims about. In the other column,
have the students list the aspects of the items that they cannot
make a claim about. Let's take the cat collar described above as
an example. The students can make a knowledge claim about the bell
on the collar and an estimate as to the collar's approximate size.
They may not be able to make a knowledge claim about the color of
the cat collar of the material it's made of.
This activity can enhance
students observational powers and develop their curiosity about
the material you’re going to teach. The process of developing
a hypothesis for what’s inside the box is a metaphor for scientific
thinking, and can be done before a formal lesson in the scientific
method. This is activity is also a metaphor for a knowledge claim
in science. Scientists are constantly faced with the unknown object
can really never look inside the box. Also, watching
how beliefs can change. The most profound experiences with this
activity are when students are convinced of one answer and then
must change their minds in light of new evidence.
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Connections/Concept
Mapping/Symbolic Language/Collages
The scientific journal
is one place where the "sentence and paragraph" form of writing
has a limited appeal. However, it is not totally absent. Depending
upon the ages and the writing skills of the students you're working
with, consider that the journal is one place where the student can
excel in describing in detail what's happening by using pictorial
representations of science. Here's a list of topics I'm hoping are
applicable to a broad range of scientific topics, and will enhance
the inquiry process for your students.
- "Isolate and integrate."
Define all the variables and consider how they interact with one
another.
- Evaluate function.
How do these objects work, and what are the parts?
- Use collages to represent
this new understanding of the material, and to make a concept
map. These can integrate written and pictorial elements.
- Use found or recycled
objects and images to encourage students to mix up and interchange
image and text.
- Students who have
difficulty explaining their thoughts in written form can excel
if given the opportunity to use a manipulative form of showing
what they know.
- Making abstract concepts
more real through art. How would you represent the water cycle
through a collage of pictures?
- The scientific journal
is one place where the sentence and paragraph structure of written
language has limited appeal. (It’s not, however, totally
absent.) Remember to include lessons in graphics creation and
analysis if that’s appropriate for your class.
- Think of this as a
pattern to follow when your students write in their journal:
- What do/did you
see/hear/feel?
- What did it look
like?
- What do you think
the function(s) are?
- How does this
(thing) relate to others you’ve seen?
- How would other cultures,
or people from other historical periods view this object? If you're
studying indigenous plants of this region, ask your students to
identify how native cultures, colonial cultures, and modern biologists
view the same species of native plants.
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Short term projects
for the journal
- Walk and write:
Class takes their journal to write what they see as it happens.
Consider this option for field trip enhancement. The trick here
is to put the immediacy of the experience into written form. Another
teacher told me how he approaches this issue: at the beginning
of the school year, ha has the students choose a spot that's their
own for the whole year. The students then return to that spot
during the year to write about how their spot has changed since
the last time they visited. The focus of the writing exercise
turns to how variables (such as weather conditions and seasons)
affect the scene.
- Media reflections:
In this activity, students clip and paste interesting print media
pictures or commentary, including everything from comic strips
to newspaper articles. Consider this option for long term homework
assignment, as students find and pay attention to interesting
articles. (For younger students, this doesn’t need to be
articles, per se, but rather something developmentally appropriate.)
- Overheads
lab: The point of the overheads lab is to give students
a particularly rich image to have them unpack and define all the
elements in the picture. A certain degree of disagreement inevitably
occurs when different students put a slightly different spin on
what they're seeing. In order to draw out these differences in
opinion among the students it's important to rely only upon primary
sources which are more real, in my mind. The overhead images are
taken from illustrations and historic sources related to a topic.
These may be found in a broad range of academic disciplines and
may only require an afternoon in a well stocked public library.
Photocopy any particulary rich and details primary sources, and
then transfer these illustrations only a transparency sheet. In
the classroom activity, present the illustration without any of
the accompanying text, or any verbal identification from you.
Again, we're going to treat this illustration as an "unknown object."
In my previous experience teaching thew overheads lab, I had the
students write about the history of the field of cosmology. The
first image I presented them with was a photograph of an Egyptian
temple ceiling, then the students wrote about a 14th
century Italian woodcut describing the Aristotelian universe,
then they wrote about graphical representation of Kepler's law
and then followed this with Hubble's actual data about an expanding
universe. I was only careful about presenting this series of images
in historical order. The students brought in all of their cultural
and scientific knowledge and collectively put together all of
the pieces of the puzzle. Not only was this much more interesting
for them, but they came to all most interesting conclusions using
their diverse knowledge to their advantage. In this activity,
everyone had something different to contribute to their construction
of the "meaning" of the picture. The "scientists" in the room
had something to say to the "humanities" crowd, for once!
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Grading and Evaluation
- What to expect and
look for when grading these journals: Engagement, duration,
frequency of written work. It's also possible to prepare a
grading worksheet for your students to fill out before handing
in the journal for the last time in the term. You can have the
student propose grades for themselves as well as have them note
a page number or date of what they feel is their best work.
- For engagement, this
is different from student to student. Be sure you state the length
of journal entry you feel is appropriate. (1 paragraph or 1 page?
Grade level will make a big difference here.)
- Be sure to state how
often you feel students should be writing in their journals. Is
twice a week sufficient for the way you want to use the journal?
- Self-reflection: Ask
questions that allow the student to evaluate their on-going achievement,
as they process through learning new skills. Students can watch
their learning process through journals, if you ask them to see
if they notice any differences. Are your students defining what
they don’t know in terms of questions? This is science. One
exercise that works well herre is to have the students writea
left column of things they want to spend more time studying before
the next big exam and another column of those topics they feel
confident about.
- Privacy concerns.
Participants should be sure to make any policies about what content
should and should not be shared in science journals is clearly
stated before any work is begun in a journal. Each teacher has
a right to say what they feel comfortable reading about in student
journal work, this is especially true with teenagers. My general
attitude is to open up the topic for students, as long as they
are able to tie their observations back to the course content
somehow. A student was absent for 3 weeks of school when I taught
the journal, but he was able to make up for some of that lost
time because he'd been able to have his journal with him and to
write his observations during that time.
- How much is the journal
worth in terms of an overall grade? At the university level, we’ve
made them worth 35% of a final grade for a "science for non-science
majors" (junior level, with many seniors) class. A student who
earnes only "B's" on the exams, but presented a thoughtful journal
could potentially earn an "A" because of the extra effort.
- What happens if a
students loses a journal? This is, frankly, the most difficult
aspect of teaching the journal. Early in the term, check the journals
on an informal check-plus/check-minus basis. Remember that you
can have students hand journals in on a rotating basis for grading
by dividing up their first names alphabetically. Then you have
a reconrd of at least some of their work before any final due
date.
- Allow students to
staple in loose pages into the journal, if that’s what it
takes for more contributions to the journal.
- Give students on-going
support with the journal. Collect it weekly at first, read it
and provide encouraging commentary. You choose if you’d like
to correct grammar. I tend to correct fundamental writing errors
while others feel that the journal is a more informal experiment
in writing. In previous classes, I've had the students choose
whether they wanted me to give comments to what they'd written
in the journal. They wrote this on the inside front cover of the
journal, so I could refer to their preferences as I picked it
up to grade. That way, I could demark that the journal was an
extention of each person, and was propoerty of the student. They
were completing the journal because I was asking them to, but
on the other hand, I was respecting their personal property by
giving them the choice of how they wanted me to respond to their
journal. Students could also write me a letter, if they wanted,
and I could write back in the journal. That way, the most crucial
questions and concerns the student had could be addressed without
concern for the 40-minute classroom period shutting our conversation
off.
- Evaluate whether you
want to make your comments in red ink. I say this because the
journal is different from a graded and testing situation. The
point of the journal is provide an opportunity for speculation,
reflection and fuzzy thinking. I prefer to keep red ink for those
occasions where there is a "right/wrong" dichotomy.
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Pretests and Posttests
Educators can administer
a pre-test at the beginning of the year to access the level of general
observation and attention your students engage in on a daily level.
This is not graded, and is limited to measuring student progress
throughout the term or year.
- Questions should be
innocuous and neutral. Ask for lists and leave the space on the
page blank, so the student can decide how big the category needs
to be. How many kinds of cereal can you name? What are the names
of all the streets in your neighborhood? How many kinds of bugs
do you know? How many kinds of horses are there? By asking questions
like these, students can answer using nomenclature (cockroaches,
ants, spiders, flies, bees) or categorical (big, small, brown,
yellow, domesticated, wild types) reference frames, or whatever
come naturally to their mind. Find questions that would evaluate
what knowledge your students come into your classroom with in
their mental suitcases, and ask them to unpack what they already
know.
- Hold onto the pretests
for the students for the duration of the term or year.
- Remember to do this
again at the end of the academic term. (You may want to do this
at some midpoint, also.)
- After you evaluate
the tests, you can give all copies back to the student at the
end of the term.
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Predictibility
Now that's you've committed
to teaching science in this fashion, how can you give cues to your
students help them remember their journal? This first step is to
give students something that makes them refer to their journal on
a regular basis. The rest is up to them! The journal is a real responsibility…taking
care of it and taking it with them to write about observing science
is a lot to ask of our students. Many teachers commented that they
would keep the journals in the classroom for students to use only
during class time.
- Question of
the Week: Provides students an opportunity to write in
depth on a question you provide related to classroom content.
- Word of the
Day: Introduce WOD at the beginning of the class time,
and you may choose to have students keep the running list of word
+ definition in their journal. Many of the WOD candidates came
from students’ misuse of a word in their papers. You may
want to make a dedicated space on your chalkboard or bulletin
board. Reinforce student retention of the vocabulary with weekly
quizzes for 3 of these words. With the caveat that the WOD must
be a word you would use in a journal, I’ve had success with
students choosing a presenting WOD.
- Object of
the Week: Leave a biological sample left in the open
for students to have an opportunity to evaluate, sketch, ruminate
and question. You need not say anything about the object, once
you’ve introduced the concept of the OOTW. Without being
told what the Remember that this should be the real thing, and
not a textbook representation. You could buy a beef heart to show
biological function. You could bring in a fern, a lily and a small
tree. You can think in terms of bringing in objects that are related
in different ways, and see who picks out the connections. Provide
little in the way text accompanying the object, but have the students
engage the object through curiosity and sense perception initially,
and then through recollection and writing. (Again, the question
here is how many connections can be made and how robust or durable
these connections are.)
- Quote of the
Week: Obviously this is going to work better for older
students, but for younger ones, this may be replaces with a sound,
a piece of music, an image.
- Music:
Our schools have become largely devoid of music appreciation classes,
but the journaling experience can include musical selections in
a fairly simple manner. One day I knew I was going to be absent
and the curriculum was teaching the history and technology of
WWII, I brought in a symphony written about these themes. (Henryk
Gorecki's beautiful, sorrowful Third Symphony) I later has the
students llisten to Philip Glass' 1976 minimalist construction
"Einstein on the Beach." The selections had the students writing
for days about what they'd heard and the connections they could
draw to other coursework.
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Moon Journals/Describe
Your Universe/Long Term Journal Projects
- The goal of these
activities is to learn observation, and to show how different
people see different aspects of the object.
- Students can also
treat you as a granting agency. If the writing in their journal
leads them to a certain central concern, would you consider accepting
proposals from the students to do a project on their own, if the
student were to document something of interest? This could be
enhanced into a year-end project, with oral reports and a poster
session at the end of the term.
- With science, as with
other human activity, what we think of as reality is largely the
product of what we see and perceive as being important. The fundamental
act of science is to choose an interesting question, and then
use the skills science provides to get at some sort of answer
or an approximation.
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In Conclusion
The scientific journal
can be used to document your students' understanding of various
"unknown objects" you give them in class. Many of us are teaching
on teams and integrating science curriculum with the other human
arts. Using the journal draw out your students' abilities and interests
is a natural and obvious choice for making the transitions easier.
In the journal, whether your students all come to the same set of
conclusions about what they's seen and heard in your classsroom
is a secondary concern to documenting their inquiry and discovery
process. They naturally come to conclusions that make sense to them,
and then have the opportunity to test their conclusions for themselves.
Using the journals, they are exposed to a multitude of interpretations
and the students get to "try out" interpretations until something
makes sense.
Send comments/suggestions
to Claudine Kavanagh
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