Learning Logs

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Learning logs differ from journals in these ways:

Journals are used for reflecting feelings and "thoughts;" learning logs are more like "minutes" of a meeting, or records of the learning process.
A familiar journal topic might be "memoirs of our trip across country" or "response journal to this year's Literature assignments." Familiar titles to learning logs might be: "Science lab notebook," "Minutes to 4H Meetings," or "Annotated List of Books I Read This Year."

When using learning logs for assessment, we need, as always, to define our goals and standards clearly. Here are questions that will aid you in shaping such goals and standards, with or without your student's help.

To what purpose is this log? Is it to be a record of the learning process, or a set of notes from which further work will be done, or something else?
Is this log to be graded? If so, by what standards?
Will neatness, punctuation, grammar, etc. be considerations in grading? If so, what are the standards?
What format should the student use when making entries?

One kind of log that may be new to you is a "response log." In this exercise, students respond to a lesson, or assignment. Response logs can be used as pop-quizzes, tests, or accountability for independent work. Here are examples of all three of these possibilities:

Pop-quiz: (Usually for Dialectic level students and up. Before using this as a surprise, it may be well to walk students through one or two "practice" response logs as quizzes. ).

At the end of a lecture or discussion time, ask students to take out a sheet of paper and head it properly.
Pose a question that causes students to summarize the content of your presentation AND state their opinion of it.
Stipulate the length of the log: short answer, one paragraph, three paragraphs, one page, two pages, etc. In most cases, learning logs are short and to the point.

Example: You just lectured about the ancient Chinese religious beliefs. You decide to see how much the student(s) understood. You ask the student(s) to take out a sheet of paper. Then, you write on your white board to be copied, or dictate, the following:

Please number your paper from 1 to 4, leaving 4 lines between each number.

After 1, please write: Major Chinese religious beliefs are...
After 2, please write: Biblical views of these beliefs are...
After 3, please write: There are these connections between Biblical ideas and Chinese religious ideas.
After 4, please write: If I were witnessing to an ancient Chinese person from the Bible, I would say...

More to come...