Blogging Article Reflection

The Impact of Using Blogs on College Students' Reading Comprehension and Learning Motivation

     I was interested in reading this study to see if the findings were similar to what I observed when I implemented blogs into my own literacy classroom last year. Of course a big difference was that my classroom consisted of 8 middle school students on the autism spectrum while the participants in the study were college students in a teacher education program. Still I found that the increase in motivation and classroom community development were very similar. It was encouraging to read that incorporating the use of blogs as a supplement to the curricula increased peer to peer interaction, created a supportive classroom learning community, potentially increased motivation, and had possibly had a positive effect on the student retention rate. 

     I was a little disappointed to read that there was no real impact on the use of the blogs and the increase of the students' reading comprehension levels. I think as readers we simply expect the results to be significant but sometimes that isn't the case. I think that with more studies researching the impact of blogs in teacher education programs and in the classroom we better understand what aspects of blogs are appealing to learners and aid in learning. I feel that blogs in this course could very much help increase reading comprehension but there was an added challenge of teaching the participating instructors about blogs and how to implement them during implementation rather than prior to implementation. Also the instructors themselves did not feel confident in using the blogs and felt they needed more support which may have had an impact in the manner that the blogs were integrated into the curricula. 

     Overall I think the study showed that blogs had only positive impacts for learners and did not hinder the students' achievement.