Reflective Writing in Active Learning Classrooms

Abstract

One student relates that “last semester I was getting B’s in my courses. This semester because I am using Reflective Writing in all of my courses to look at the material before I come to class, I am an A student.” The increase in the student’s marks indicates that the self-dialogue helped the student develop functions within the zone of proximal development.

“Sometimes when you start Reflective Writing, you realize that you do not understand the content. While doing Reflective Writing, you can often pinpoint particular important ideas you don’t understand. It causes you to have questions too. Sometimes that is painful because you expect yourself to have answers and don’t. I try to look up answers from books I have at home after doing Reflective Writing. But it has happened that I stumbled upon an answer myself during my Reflective Writing. Actually I do explore the answers to my questions while doing Reflective Writing” (student view on the purpose of reflective writing).

Appendix: Instructions for Students on How to Do Reflective Writing and Evaluating the Products (Huang and Kalman 2012)

Many of you may have experience that during discussion with others, you can clarify your ideas. Speaking to others is always helpful to obtain a better understanding. The idea of doing reflective writing is to construct a self-dialogue about what you have read. The main difference between summary and reflective writing is that in a summary you write down what you already have in your mind during your reading, while in doing reflective writing, you question what you read and relate it to other concerns. Don’t just pick up important sentences or ideas from the textbook and give me a list!

To do it, first finish reading the material, at the same time, you may underline, highlight, or even do summarization. Then close your book, and rethink about what you have in your brain, at the same time, write down your rethinking rapidly. Don’t pay attention to grammar, it’s not formal writing, but jotting. Write down your own understanding of concepts, relationship among those concepts, or even relationship of the material to former chapters and your former knowledge from other disciplines and life experience. Don’t worry if what you are writing is right or not. Marking is not based on that.

Students’ reflective writing is not marked for content. Students do the reflective writing for themselves. If marked, students would write for the instructor, worrying about paragraphing and sentence structure. Instead, marking is done using the rubric found in Fig. 6.3 (Khanam and Kalman 2017). The rubric is provided to the students, and it asks them to include in their writings their questioning and the connections they make to relate different parts/concepts of the course material they read about. Each of the four RW aspects targeted by the rubric are evaluated on a four- point scale. The first aspect (line 1 on the table) verifies that the student has read the material and that it was expressed in the RW with his or her own words. The second and third aspects of the table (lines 2 and 3) verify that the student looked for connections between the concepts in the targeted course material and connections with their everyday lives. The fourth aspect (line 4) triggers questioning. The questioning can be about parts of the material as well as on how concepts are connected. RW emphasizes reflective thinking about what students have read.