Improving Journalism Students' Critical-Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Communication Skills through Creating a Campus Magazine
Abstract
This session will demonstrate how the creation of a campus magazine through a collaboration of journalism courses resulted in significantly greater reported progress on objectives related to students’ critical thinking and real-world problem- solving skills. Three journalism classes worked together to produce a campus magazine. A feature writing course generated story content while a photojournalism course provided photos to accompany the articles, and a magazine production and design course produced story layouts and decided the page imposition. All work was completed in one semester with students coordinating the project and making many of the decisions professional journalists make.
A pretest-posttest of items related to critical thinking and real-world problem- solving showed significant gains in students’ perceived progress on eight items of a 19-item survey on learning objectives comparing the courses participating in this project to a “typical” college course. Progress was reported on items such as learning and applying new information to solve a problem; communicating effectively; thinking creatively; solving real-world problems; effectively learning on their own; making effective decisions; a reduction of rote memorization; active learning strategies; and community involvement. This conference session will include suggestions for best practices in implementing this experiential learning approach and active learning strategies.
Location
Room 1002
Recommended Citation
Wilson, Brenda C., "Improving Journalism Students' Critical-Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Communication Skills through Creating a Campus Magazine" (2015). SoTL Commons Conference. 152.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons/SoTL/2015/152
Improving Journalism Students' Critical-Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Communication Skills through Creating a Campus Magazine
Room 1002
This session will demonstrate how the creation of a campus magazine through a collaboration of journalism courses resulted in significantly greater reported progress on objectives related to students’ critical thinking and real-world problem- solving skills. Three journalism classes worked together to produce a campus magazine. A feature writing course generated story content while a photojournalism course provided photos to accompany the articles, and a magazine production and design course produced story layouts and decided the page imposition. All work was completed in one semester with students coordinating the project and making many of the decisions professional journalists make.
A pretest-posttest of items related to critical thinking and real-world problem- solving showed significant gains in students’ perceived progress on eight items of a 19-item survey on learning objectives comparing the courses participating in this project to a “typical” college course. Progress was reported on items such as learning and applying new information to solve a problem; communicating effectively; thinking creatively; solving real-world problems; effectively learning on their own; making effective decisions; a reduction of rote memorization; active learning strategies; and community involvement. This conference session will include suggestions for best practices in implementing this experiential learning approach and active learning strategies.
