Journals, questionnaires, and interviews

When I read the title of this chapter, I immediately thought of Classroom Research, since we have been discussing about these data collection techniques and the importance they have on gathering reliable information about a group students with the purpose of selecting participants to carry out a research project. Although, this chapter shares the same concepts the purpose is slightly different. For instance, in here, the teacher needs to be a full-time researcher in order to identify students strengths and weaknesses in their learning processes and assess the properly according to the data collected by doing an ongoing process. Something that I would like to mention about this reading is the value of implementing journals in the classroom, because as Genesee &Upshur (1996) points out journals are written conversations between the teacher and the students. It indicates that the teacher replies learners inquires about a specific topic in a written way. Additionally, journals provide some benefits such as useful individualized instruction in which the teacher and the student share and complement different pieces of information. Also, they promote students involvement and ownership since students performance is not assessed, language used is more relevant. In addition, I would like to highlight the importance of designing and implementing questionnaires and interviews, there are some steps to be followed in order to collect information about the different topics that were thought during a specific period of time. Finally, it is important to remark that those alternative in assessment should be implemented carefully, responsibly and with a previous training.