Independent of your regular lecture notes, we ask that you keep an active journal (in a bound notebook or in a loose-leaf, three-ring, or other binder), with an average of at least one significant entry per week. We will suggest topics for you to write about on roughly a weekly basis, usually on Thursdays. You should hand in your weekly entry the following Tuesday. The journal will be worth 6% of your course grade.

What is the purpose of the Reflective Journal assignment?

• To capture your perception of the subject matter, your problem-solving skills, and your cooperative learning skills, and to track changes in them over the course of the semester.
  
  
• To encourage you to assess your own, your groupmates', and your instructors' learning strategies, processes and behaviors during the course. (We want you to practice looking at yourself and others as learners objectively.)
  
  
• To reflect on your self-assessments, evaluate yourself as a learner, identify areas that you would like to improve, and assess, reflect upon, and evaluate your efforts to improve.

What should you include in your weekly journal?

We will generally ask you to address specific questions each week. However, in general you will do the following:

1. Reflect on specific positive experiences and on specific challenges or difficulties that you encountered while working in cooperative groups. For example:
   
   1. Cite specific examples of your groupmates' and/or your own behavior that you think contributed constructively to your group's cooperative efforts. Such behavior could include questions initiated by group members (including yourself) and/or responses that show how group members fulfilled their responsibilities as role players or stakeholders in the earth science problem under consideration; encouraging or supportive responses to proposed ideas; constructive criticism of an idea rather than the proposer of the idea; connections made to topics covered earlier in the course; prodding the group back on task if it wanders off it; etc.
      
   2. Cite specific examples of any behaviors that you will not tolerate. Such unproductive behaviors might include frequent interruptions; disparagement of another's idea; wandering off task; nonparticipation, including silence and absence; superficial or otherwise inadequate contributions to group research and writing efforts; etc.
      
   3. Comment on the extent to which each member of the group followed or did not follow your group's ground rules.
      
      
2. Reflect on specific monitoring, intervention, summarizing and feedback strategies that the instructors used to help your group improve its performance.
   
   
   
3. Considering not only cooperative problem-solving activities but also other teaching strategies used by the instructors, identify things that you felt worked well and things that did not work well. For things that didn't work well, think of how you might do things differently next time, and suggest practical modifications, strategies or models that might help you or your group learn better. Think of instructional resources and techniques that might help you generate more or better ideas or design better action plans and that might help you learn more effectively (for example, using physical models, hands-on manipulations, visuals, graphs/charts, field trips, instructional technology/computer software, projects, etc.).
   
   
4. Each time that you turn in your journal for evaluation and feedback, summarize and evaluate your own sense of progress to date learning the subject matter, reseaching and solving problems, and working in cooperative groups.