May Journal Club
By Brian Nairn
The Teaching Commons hosted the May 2019 meeting of the Journal Club this past Wednesday, May 8. Our discussion of Development of a New Framework to Guide, Assess, and Evaluate Student Reflections in a University Sustainability Course (https://teachingcommons.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WhalenPaez_2019_Framework_to_Assess_Reflection.pdf) was an interesting exploration of experiential education and the challenges associated with assessing reflection. The unique aspect of this research is the alignment of the framework to Bloom’s Taxonomy.
This article discusses the 5-year process of developing a new framework, rubric, and guide that students and evaluators can use to support experiential education through reflection. It starts off by discussing the relationship between critical thinking and reflective learning, with the example being that one can think without reflecting or learning, but thought that involves critical reflection involves learning. Thus, the importance of reflection in the learning process is highlighted.
It was noted that there were a number of models of reflection that already existed, but there was limited information on how to apply those in practice. This was considered especially challenging as reflection is most effective when taught and guided by educator.
Given the recent push from national and provincial governments to provide an opportunity for experiential education to all higher education students before they graduate, it is often difficult to measure success or impact aside from counting courses that offer an experiential component. Prior to being able to measure results at an institutional level, it is important to have effective tools to guide, assess, and evaluate experiential education at the student level. This lead to the development of the Reflective Learning Framework (RLF) that was designed and used for a specific program at McMaster University that focuses on experiential education.
The author’s go on to describe a robust approach and the iterative process of developing the RLF using a grounded theory approach. First, a set of university-level student reflections was analyzed to look for categories of themes that could be used to describe how the reflections were written. This was followed by comparing these categories to previous models for guided reflection. The result was a first version of the RLF that was then piloted on a 3rd year course with one reflection component.
After consultation with students and educators, the second version was developed which included aligning the framework to Bloom’s taxonomy, which is used to classify learning outcomes into levels of increasing complexity (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create). Once the addition of Bloom’s Taxonomy was included, further testing and refinement were carried out. This included tutorial sessions for students on how to use the framework, and debriefs after their first assignment using it.
The framework in its current form has two main categories (Recount and Discussion) and a total of eight reflective components. The category “Recount” includes the reflective components: temporal progression; important aspects of the experience; and connection to academic theory. The category “Discussion” includes: relating to other contexts/drawing connections; personal thoughts and feelings; cause-and-effect relationships; other possible responses; and planning and future practice.
The article concludes with lessons learned and suggestions for use:
– Tailor the framework to support the specific application
– Share the framework, guide, and rubric with students
– Provide opportunities for multiple reflections
– Use the framework to guide and support self-and peer-evaluation
– Remove uncertainty by focusing on knowledge and skills demonstrated
The additional rubric and user guide is publicly available at https://asp.mcmaster.ca/experiential-learning-project-opportunities-2/experiential-learning-project-resources/ (see “Reflective Learning Framework” and “Reflective Learning Framework Handout”)
The discussion that followed amongst the group of journal club attendees was a lively conversation about the value that a framework like this provides. For example, one main point that was raised was the importance of the affective domain in learning. One of the criticisms of Bloom’s taxonomy (as noted by the author’s) is the focus on the cognitive domain, with the affective domain often ignored. This article uses metacognition as the bridge between the cognitive and affective domains, and [critical] reflection as the tool for metacognition. As such, reflection has the potential to include both cognitive and affective aspects of learning. This point was raised as especially pertinent in the Humanities, where affective learning is an important component and is often underrepresented or ignored entirely when thinking about the learning process and developing learning outcomes.
This lead to a discussion of shared challenges across disciplines of trying to effectively use or assess student reflections. This included those from Humanities, Nursing, and Environmental Science, all of whom expressed certain challenges associated with reflections, and all agreed in the value of having a framework readily available, especially with the connections to Bloom’s taxonomy, which is fairly common language for educators.
One of the main questions raised in the discussion was what this RLF would actually look like in practice. The article itself only describes the process for developing the RLF and does not go into much detail into how to use it. However, the article does allude to the rubric and user guide and provides a URL for where to access that information.
From a personal level, I would definitely try to use and tailor the RLF in my own teaching. Though I currently do not do experiential education per se, I would feel more inclined to actually develop a reflection-based of assignment having this framework as a guide. Given the flexibility in the design, there is a lot of potential for being able to use this in any practical setting. Additionally, seeing as this is a newly developed tool there are lots of opportunities for future research to measure the impact it has.
To summarize, this article describes the 5-year process for developing a framework to guide, assess, and evaluate student reflections. The different iterations of the framework are discussed, as well as lessons learned and suggestions for how to use the tool. Additional resources are documented within the article to help assist with the in-practice aspect.
Thank you all for reading this post!
Please join the conversation using the comments box below.
The Journal Club is an opportunity for colleagues interested in exploring innovation in teaching and learning to collaboratively read and discuss literature in the field. Participants are provided with a journal article identified as a topic of potential interest to be discussed in an informal gathering at the Teaching Commons.
Do you have an article to share or a topic you would like to discuss? Are you interested in leading a conversation of the Journal Club? Contact Lisa Endersby, Educational Developer (lendersb@yorku.ca).