A reflective document kept through the period of a learning detailing day to day activities, learnings, and challenges i.e., work placement journal or laboratory journal.
Advantages & Challenges
Advantages
Challenges
Advantages
It is an authentic method that is commonly used to understand what students experience in parts of the program usually unseen by staff, especially their thoughts on what and how they learn.
Keeping reflections in a repository for students to access can be valuable. It becomes a useful resource that they can refer to as they progress through the programme and even after graduating.
Reflections can be a way to encourage students to self-evaluate their work. Asking students to look back on their own reflections and use them to improve their future work can help students to take accountability for their own learning journey.
Challenges
It is important to outline clear guidance for students in relation to the elements required in a reflective journal. If the reflections are too unstructured, it can become very difficult to mark.
Some students can find this style of writing difficult, especially if it is not something they have been asked to do within the programme before.
Assessing the depth of reflection in student journals can be challenging, as it’s not always easy to gauge the extent to which students have engaged critically with their experience.
Tips for Use
Give clear guidance around structure of the reflective journal. Include prompts for what you require them to talk about.
In such briefings it’s important to open dialogues about how confidentiality matters (for example, patient data) and how personal details should be treated in an assignment that is likely to be seen not only by the marker but also by other academics and the external examiner.
It’s a good idea to provide a framework for students’ reflections which allow them to write a limited number of words on each of the following headings:
Title
What was the context?
What did you do?
What was your rationale for doing what you did?
What literature did you use to underpin your actions? Please give full citations.
What were the outcomes?
What would you do differently next time?
What did you learn about yourself from this experience?
It’s particularly useful to give a framework like this for students undertaking their first reflection in a programme, but maintaining a fixed structure with restricted word counts is beneficial even towards the end of a programme.
Resources
Sambell, K., & Brown, S (2023). Choosing and using fit-for-purpose assessment methods. Heriot Watt University.(Page 19) Link: https://sally-brown.net/download/3496/
