The relationship between e-journaling and sophomore High school students.' understanding of physical science concepts

Abstract

High school sophomore Physical Science students were required to create blogs in response to the teacher's prompts relating to the course's topics and post comments to their peers' blogs in this investigation. This research was conducted over a span of six weeks. The three units covered during the course of this study were forces, work and simple machines, and energy. Collection instruments included student interviews, teacher assessments of the students' blogs, comparison of pretest and posttest scores, and student survey responses. Student participation, student blog responses, and blog quality all decreased over the course of this study although the student survey indicated a majority of students felt the quality of their blogs improved over time. Students indicated that they felt blogging did help them better understand Physical Science topics covered during the class. There was an increase between student pretest and posttests for each unit.