Reflective journals in college courses are spaces to document what you are doing and to consider the experiences as part of your learning. While reflective journals are and have been commonly used in classes such as Composition, they have become more popular in a broad array of college courses, even the sciences. This expanded popularity makes a lot of sense because the point of reflective journals is for students to consider their learning in deeper ways, a process more meaningful than memorizing information for tests.

Reflective journals do allow students to look back at their work over a longer period of time, such as a semester, to help them remember useful concepts or information they have learned; however, the purpose of the journals goes beyond that. Ideally, reflective journals help students think about what they have learned and how the knowledge has impacted them as learners. This will probably mean the reflective entries are some combination of learning breakthroughs, where ideas become more clear, and learning struggles, where students have a difficult time with ideas, and a lot in between. Whatever the case, reflective journals should be spaces where students can write and feel okay with confusion, complication, and even failure. Working through those thoughts, along with the successes, through lower-stakes writing, is valuable to better understanding one’s individual learning.

From the Beinecke Flickr Laboratory

You might think that a reflective journal sounds a lot like a diary, and there is some overlap between the two. Both are chronological and used to record events; however, one main difference is in the purpose. A reflective journal is a space for metacognition, that is becoming more self-aware about your thinking through writing, reading, and contemplation.