The effect of daily graded reflective journaling on gains in conceptual understanding and the scientific attitude toward conceptual understanding for high school students studying Newtonian mechanics

Daily, graded, reflective journaling by high school students studying Newtonian mechanics was the focus this study. Literature is presented that establishes student misconceptions are an obstacle to the development of conceptual understanding of Newtonian principles and that the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), used in conjunction with the Hake gain analysis, is the accept metric within the Physics Educational Research community for measuring gain in conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics and the effectiveness of instructional methodology. The Force Concept Inventory coupled with the Hake gain calculation revealed that for the Physics students and the honors Physical Science students that engaged in reflective journaling focused on the concepts being studied and how those concepts compared to their existing understandings achieved significant gains in conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. The measured gains in conceptual understanding for these groups was found to compare favorably with other Interactive-Engagement instructional methodologies regarding the facilitation of gain in conceptual understanding.;The change in the scientific attitude toward conceptual understanding that took place over the duration of the study was also investigated. No significant change was found to have occurred regarding this variable for the major sub-groups of this study, although females seemed to derive greater benefit than males through engaging in daily, graded, reflective journaling.