Purpose

Reflective writing helps people learn, and it helps them transfer their learning to new contexts. Those may seem like bold claims, but there is ample research to support them. In fact, it would be difficult to overstate the value of reflective practice for students. And it turns out that when teachers assign reflective writing, they benefit too!

Illustration of woman writing, surrounded by a thought bubble filled with creative icons like a lightbulb, plent, and UFO, symoblizing imagination and creative writing.
Illustration of a woman working on a laptop while sitting on a donut chart next to a bar graph.

Benefits

  • Research shows that students who practice reflection:
    • develop the ability to plan and problem solve (Reid) 
    • build conceptual understanding (Doe, Pilgrim, and Gehrtz)
    • understand their learning process and appreciate their learning development (Gorlewski and Greene)
    • improve their overall learning performance (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking)
    • construct a learning identity (Whitney, McCracken, and Washell)
    • develop self-regulation (Chaterdon), self-assessment (Yancey), and other dispositions of lifelong learners (Ryan)
    • transfer their skills and knowledge to new contexts (Taczak and Robertson) including the workplace (Simper, Gauthier, and Scott)
  • For teachers, research shows that reflective activities and assignments can:
    • improve student reading and supports classroom discussions (Sage and Sele)
    • reveal how students understand and apply conceptual knowledge (Reed and Williams)
    • provide evidence of students’ nonlinear developmental trajectory (Sims et al.) 
    • supply information other assessment tools can’t: what, how and why students learned (Yancey)

TESTIMONIALS

What do professors and students say?

  • “Process Experience”

    Reflective writing is the best way to measure learning from experience. There are other ways to demonstrate learning, but to do it in a way that is measurable, and that speaks to [the student’s] capacity to process experience, writing is the key.
    Dr. Frank Christianson
    English Major

  • “Transformative”

    Incorporating reflective writing into my course has transformed the way students engage with the material—rather than just memorizing concepts, they critically analyze their learning, connect it to real-world applications, and develop a deeper sense of personal and professional growth.
    Dr. Jackie Johnson
    Biology Major

  • “Understand Concepts”

    Before using reflective writing, I mostly just memorized facts for tests. But once I started reflecting, I began to understand how the concepts applied to my life and goals. It changed the way I learn.
    Samantha Lee
    Psychology Major

  • “Explain my reasoning”

    We took most of our quizzes twice—once as an individual and once as a group. Because we had to reach a consensus on our answers, I had to actually explain my reasoning, and thus I was able to find any issues with it—both through peer review and through being forced to reflect.
    GE STEM Student

  • “Engage with the content”

    The reflective writing assignments that we were given throughout the course were really helpful, because we did one at the beginning of each unit, kind of framed through the different scientific questions that we studied. I really think it helped me engage with the content more, kind of letting me discuss out what I already knew, and then after the unit reflecting, ‘Oh, all of this different stuff that I’ve learned, let’s put this all into a plan for how I can apply this, throughout my time at BYU, later on in the course, and throughout my life.’ So yeah, that was really helpful.
    GE STEM Student

  • “Be confident in what I knew”

    I could kind of look back as I did the reflection and say, ‘Oh, look how much I’ve grown!’ It helped me to understand that I do have a basis or foundation here. It helped me to be confident in what I knew, and to be able to lay it out and say, ‘Oh, this is what I know.’ And so it was very good.
    GE STEM Student

  • “See the progress”

    A lot of times with me for school, I was like, ‘Oh, like, am I actually even learning anything?’ So I feel like [reflection] was really, like, helpful, because then I could see the progress, like, ‘Oh, I actually did learn something that I didn’t know before.’
    GE STEM Student

  • “How it applies to other things”

    “I was able to think about what it was I was learning, but also how it applies to other things we’ve learned and also just my life.”
    GE STEM Student

  • “Do something with our knowledge”

    [Reflection allows you] to take into account where you are, why [your learning] matters to you and how it matters to you. I think it’s definitely an important aspect of the learning process, especially at BYU, where, we intend to do something with our knowledge instead of just acquiring it.
    GE STEM Student

  • “Summarize information”

    [Reflection] helps me summarize information in an easy way to understand. A lot of times people have questions about medication that they’re taking, or they’re having questions about a vaccine, or things like that. I can take the information that I know, and then explain it in a way that’s simple, and that is more digestible for people.
    GE STEM Student

  • “Remember what I learned”

    [Reflection] helped me remember what I learned. It showed what parts stuck with me, and it also showed parts where I had probably not remembered as well, and then I could go back and double-check those.
    GE STEM Student

  • “Actually apply it to my life”

    Reflection helps me reflect on the information, so I didn’t just forget it and treat it like everything else where I just leave it in the classroom. I can actually apply it to my life later.
    GE STEM Student

Research on Reflective Writing

Here are some fascinating results from studies done on reflective writing. Cited below are the published articles. Find more research on the Scholarship page.

Infographic of a progress bar showing 44% of students changed their belief or understanding.
Infographic of a pie chart showing students changed in four conceptual and behavioral aspects: patience 88, self-worth 85, gratitude 77, and volunteerism 72.
Infographic of an open book icon showing approximately 97% of academic journals studied showed at least one element of reflection.

1 Reflective writing for enhancing knowledge integration in modularised study programmes

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.

2 Developing college students’ critical thinking through reflective writing

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.

3 A Method for Assessing Reflective Journal Writing

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.

Further Scholarship