STUDENTS’ REFLECTIVE JOURNALS: HOW CAN WE IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING?

The researcher discusses how she continues to learn from the reflective journals that are submitted by her students at the end of each final year of study in the research methodology classroom. These reflective journals provide opportunity to learn about different ways of simplifying curriculum in order to improve the rate and quality of student access to learning (epistemological access) and success. Constructivist instructional methods were preferred because they are all learner centred in that they not only place the student at the centre of learning but they impose more responsibility on students for their own learning to enable active learning through focused and real life instructional activities. The co-construction of learning activities which included student presentations enhanced learning in the research methodology classroom. The case that is reported in this paper is contextualised within the Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education class of 2015 in one University of Technology in South Africa. The insights from the students’ reflective journals indicate that the students not only learned effectively but they enjoyed learning because they could also fit in new information learned from the research module into existing cognitive structures that enabled them to apply the learning strategies to other modules.