"Scholarly" or "academic" journals are resources published by researchers and academics for a scholarly purpose. That means they are a higher level of research and more credible or trustworthy than non-scholarly publications. These resources may or may not be peer reviewed as well.
When your instructor asks for scholarly or academic articles, they are asking you to research in the library or Google Scholar for high quality resources written by academics. When searching in the library databases, you may be able to limit to scholarly or academic journals.
