Journaling is a pedagogical strategy that continues to gain momentum and research support as a means to increase college students' course engagement, promote application of classroom materials to real life situations, and provide deeper understanding of materials (Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Fritson, K. K., Forrest, K. D. & Bohl, M. L. 2011; Oxendine, 1988). The current project explores the effects of reflective journaling on students' content comprehension. We hypothesized the use of reflective

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... journaling in the classroom would increase student's content comprehension above and beyond another common teaching strategy, online quizzing. Over the course of one semester, participants enrolled in a Lifespan Development course at a Midwestern university completed four reflective journals relating course content to their lives. We scored each reflective journal using Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives for the Cognitive Domain (Bloom, B.S., Engelhart, M.D., Furst, F.J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. 1956). Students also completed online quizzes. Using step-wise regression analysis, we compared the reflective journal Bloom scores and the online quiz scores to students' exam performance. Results indicated that compared to online quizzing, completing reflective journals that target course content had greater impact on students' exam grades.