Exploring students' learning journals with web-based interactive report tool

Students' journal writings could be useful resources for teachers to grasp their understandings and to see their own teaching objectively. However, reading a large number of journals thoroughly 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 opinions. In this paper, we propose an interactive report tool for exploring journal writings. Focusing on the efficiency of reading learning journals, it employs weekly keywords extracted from journals as entry points for journal sentences. It enables us to read journal sentences selectively. The tool also provides lists of most used adjectives from week to week, which is helpful for teachers to grasp the temporal variation of opinions through a semester. We conducted a preliminary questionnaire about the usefulness of the report tool targeting teachers of the course "Information Science" in our university. Most of them evaluated our tool positively although the number of answers were small.