Scholarship
The following resources provide you with additional research and scholarship on reflective writing.
Benefits of Reflective Writing
Sayantani DasGupta and Rita Charon
This article describes a reflective writing exercise, the “personal illness narrative,” used in a second-year medical student humanities seminar.
Liudmila Mikalayeva, Stoyan Panov, and Elina Schleutker
To prevent the fragmentation and encapsulation of knowledge, the authors created a reflective writing exercise, “Building Bridges,” that requires students to find connections between courses.
Hui-Chin Yeh, Shih-hsien Yang, Jo Shan Fu, and Yen-Chen Shih
This mixed methods study found that through reflective writing, students improved in critical thinking, self-worth, volunteerism, patience, and gratefulness.
Franco Zengaro and Asghar Iran-Nejad
This study found that instructors asking probing questions and using symbolism, metaphors, and experiences helped facilitate student engagement and cross-domain perspectives.
Betsy Cooper
An analysis of student writing portfolios demonstrates that reflective writing promotes engaged and co-participatory learning, fosters a metacognitive approach to dance training, and spurs a positive shift in student perceptions of themselves as dancers and learners.
John McCarthy
This article considers the application of reflection via reflective education for built environment professional disciplines such as spatial planning and surveying, and how this is linked to subsequent application in professional practice.
2010
Hedy S. Wald and Shmuel P. Reis
Within this article, we consider opportunities and challenges associated with the implementation of reflective writing curricula for promotion of reflective capacity within medical education.”
Lisa Wegner, Patricia Struthers, Suraya Mohamed
This paper describes the use of reflective writing with adolescents as part of a health-promoting schools project in Cape Town, South Africa. … Reflective writing enabled the participants to acknowledge personal changes and development and provide insight into their feelings and experiences.”
Elizabeth G. Allan and Dana Lynn Driscoll
This article presents a three fold model of reflection used to assess a US general education first-year writing course.
Reflective Writing Assignments
Anne H. Reilly
Three examples of brief reflective assignments are presented suitable for management educators teaching undergraduate, graduate, or non-credit learners:(1) writing an organizational story, (2) a reflection about learning from adversity, and(3) a goal oriented personal change.
Sarah L. Ash and Patti H. Clayton
This article will consider the meaning of critical reflection and principles of good practice for designing it effectively and will present a research-grounded, flexible model for integrating critical reflection and assessment.
Obidimma Ezezika and Nancy Johnston
Considering Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle framework, in this article, we detail the design, implementation, and evaluation of a reflective writing assignment integrated into a lower-year undergraduate public health biology course.
Laura Wildemann Kane
This article will “demonstrate how Focused Reading Responses motivate students to 1) critically engage with reading assignments, and 2) write more substantive reading responses.
Taryn Melkus Bayles
This paper features a description of a major engineering project that engages students in critical thinking and reflection, along with its challenges, solutions, and rubric.
Edmund Tsang and Edward Zlotkowski
This article is designed as a practical guide for faculty seeking to integrate service learning into engineering courses.
Assessing Reflective Writing
Christopher J. Koliba
This article, the author reviews his experiences using an assessment tool to evaluate reflection assignments in the context of teaching public affairs courses, draws references to experiential learning theories, and explores implications for educating reflective practitioners.”
Margaret M. Plack, Maryanne Driscoll, Sylvene Blissett, Raymond McKenna, and
Thomas P. Plack
The coding schema developed [from this study] provides a mechanism to assess evidence of reflection in written journals, which enables instructors to evaluate student competency, obtain a baseline for facilitating reflective practice, and assess their own efficacy.
Cecilia K. Y. Chan, Hannah Y. H. Wong, and Jiahui Luo
Teachers’ understanding of reflective writing, teachers’ understanding of assessing reflections, as well as teacher training, are discussed in this exploratory study. The findings provide insight into how reflection is currently understood among teachers, also offering suggestions for reflective practices in higher education.”
Ofer Chen and Yoav Bergner
The purpose of this paper is to… [produce] a protocol for teacher reflective practice that can apply to challenging and feedback-giving situations,” including feedback behaviors such as “a comprehensive rubric and an increase in the frequency, specificity, and depth of feedback given to student written work.”
Nisrine N. Makarem, Basem R. Saab1, Grace Maalouf, Umayya Musharafieh, Fadila Naji, Diana Rahme, and Dayana Brome
This study finds that “the newly developed scale, GRE-9, is a short, concise, easy-to-use, reliable grading tool for reflective essays that has demonstrated moderate to substantial inter-rater reliability. This will allow raters to objectively grade reflective essays and provide informed feedback to residents and students.
Jo Anne Genua
This study’s findings indicated that a significant relationship exists between the grading of reflective journals and student honesty.