The effect of reflective journal writing to students’ critical thinking and mathematical communication skills

Abstract

The objective of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the effects of reflective journal writing to the students’ critical thinking and mathematical communication skills. There were two teaching strategies under investigation in this study: the lecture-discussion approach and the reflective journal writing approach. A total of 60 participants, 30 prospective teachers from two comparable classes underwent the two teaching approaches. The students’ critical thinking and mathematical communication skills were measured using researcher-made tests, which were content-validated and reliability tested. The lecture-discussion approach involved five phases: introduction, presentation, comprehension monitoring, integration, and review and closure. The reflective journal writing approach involved initializing, exploring, and connecting processes. Findings revealed that the performance of students in mathematical communication skills exposed to reflective journal writing approach was significantly higher than the performance of students exposed to the lecture-discussion approach. In contrast, there was no significant difference in the mean gain scores in critical thinking for both lecture-discussion and reflective journal writing groups.