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Maybe if you get students to check each others notes each day and have them report if their partner did not have theirs. By answering each others questions they are doing a review which checking on each other. That way you only need to keep track of the ones who are absent or did not do the work. I would not allow anyone to turn it in late other than for being absent. This teaches responsibility to the students and takes a lot of work off you.

Do you have a class website? Mine are Google sites so it would be fairly easy to create a Google form to do what you are being asked to do. The parent would have to access the form online and digitally document their child's study. They could also write the questions that their child has on the form, which you could access from your classroom and use as the basis of a class discussion/review.

Shalen, your post caught my attention because I have never used study logs, but have heard of them. The first question that comes to my mind is what do you hope to gain from the students using the study logs? I use graphing notebooks in my Design and Engineering and Science classes and for the first time have gone away from scoring them myself. Instead, I am creating a half sheet with questions I ask students to search for in someone else’s notebook and write the answer on the sheet. This holds students accountable for making sure they have the notes, labs being complete, diagrams labeled, learning targets written, but minimizes the amount of time I have to put in scoring work. An unforeseen benefit is students complain they can’t read a peers writing, can’t find something because there are no dates, incomplete notes, a diagram is missing, or some other issue that prevents them from finding the information in the notebook. All of a sudden the students are hearing from peers how difficult it is to find the needed resources. Students have become more responsible for helping each other get organized, get caught up and overall improve the quality of their work. Once their work improved, test scores, classroom discourse and participation improved. Labs and diagrams were more complete and overall learning improved.

The easy way to keep track to have this one box and label it notes or something like that. Then, when students walk in the class, they can turn in their work in that box. It would make it easier to keep track of who was there or who was doing the assignment and call out those who did not turn in their work.