The Summary Journal 5

Exploring Students' Learning Journals with Web-Based Interactive Report Tool

Source: 14th International Conference on Cognition and Exploration Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2017)

By Yuta Taniguchi, Fumiya Okubo, Atsushi Shimida and Shini'ichi Konomi

     In this article, the researchers examine about students' learning journal with use an interactive report tool. For researchers, students' journal writing could be useful resources for teachers to grasp their understanding and see their own teaching objectively. However, reading a large number of journals throughly is not always realistic for teachers. Although various automatic analysis methods have been proposed to understand learning journals, they does not necessarily fit needs of teachers and tend to overlook minor opinion.

     This research uses a web-based interactive report tool for journal entries, which provides word-based navigation mechanism and shows patterns of word usage. The researchers also consider a kind of keyword that helps them to understand a wide variety topic of journal entries. The graphical user interface displays such as keywords as entry points of journal exploration. The keywords are shown in ranking tables for each week, and it can be seen how the usage of words varies from week to week and also show frequent adjectives for every week, which presents the temporal change in sentiment.

     The measurement proposed in (Taniguchi et al., 2017), which identifies weekly keywords. Minor opinions or topics are relatively difficult to notice when they read students' journals in a limited time. Most of the journal entries usually share the common topics, and thus they skip some redundant entries. The important measure balance between minor and major topics by taking into account both frequency and the week-specificity of a word, where week-specificity is computed from the week frequency of the word in dataset. Since minor opinions, highly related to particular course topics tend ti include week-specific word, it can be efficiency ignored redundant entries by choosing entries that includes weekly keywords.