How to Assess and Provide Feedback to Reflective Writing Assignments
by Michelle Head, CETL Scholarly Teaching Fellow for Reflective Practices
This article is part of the larger, Reflective Practices for Teaching.
Reflection is a subjective process and therefore often seen as difficult to assess. The assessment a reflection assignment may take on one of two forms. One being the evaluation of the process the learner went through to produce the assignment or the second being the evaluation of the final product that is produced. To determine what you will evaluate, it will be helpful to revisit the learning objective that the reflection assignment is fulfilling.
Once you determine what the nature of your evaluation, it will be important to consider the criteria that will assessed and the nature of the feedback you wish to provide to the learner. The University of Edinburgh has a website that proposes an expansive list of criteria that you may choose to assess. Additionally, this website shares some sample rubrics that can be used or adapted to meet the needs of your course.
KSU's It’s About Engagement Initiative has developed a reflection checklist and holistic rubric which may be provided to students to guide their writing.
Remember there needs to be reciprocal communication in some way and specifically focused on discussing the assignments and feedback through:
- Meetings (face-to-face or virtual)
- Consider using a worksheet or “agenda” to guide those meetings
- Written communication
- Crowdsourcing in a class session
- Peer feedback
If you tweak the way you provide feedback for assignments across the semester, you may be able to push students to build the “reflection muscle” without necessarily adding a lot of assignments to what you already do in the course. This will depend upon how you structure your assessments, but it might allow you to get “more bang for your buck” in terms of assignments throughout the semester. For example, for a major research paper, students could develop portions of the project across the semester (research question, proposal, annotated bibliography, draft of individual sections, etc.). Giving feedback for each of these for students (and having a mechanism by which they can respond to that feedback), allows them to engage in reflection as they build toward the final project.
Additional Examples of Reflection Assignments
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