Student reflection is designed to assist students in thinking about their learning processes, their learning experiences, and their metacognition. Reflection is a critical component for teaching students to be self-directed learners. Students should reflect on the course content and it’s application to their personal and professional lives.

Dee Fink’s Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning includes a series of questions for including reflection in course design (p 19-20).

Students reflect with:

• • oneself through journaling or learning portfolios
  • others through class discussion or others outside of class
• Students reflect about:
  • the subject of the course: what is an appropriate and full understanding of this topic?
  • the learning process:
    • What am I learning?
    • Of what value is this?
    • How did I learn?
    • What else do I need to learn?
• Students reflect via:
  • one-minute papers
    • i.e. What is the most important thing you learned in this module?
    • What was the “muddiest point” from this module?
  • weekly journal writing
  • learning portfolios

Need more ideas for designing reflection?

• A unit designed of an authentic task, a journal for individual reflection, discussion for social reflection, and a final paper of publishable quality reflection.
• Four steps of critical reflection
• Reflection basics: A guide for processing a service experience (could be adapted for any required real-world experience)
• Sample questions for reflection (again in the context of service, but could be adapted for any learning experience)
• Reflection questions from lowest to highest on Bloom’s Taxonomy
• When including reflection as part of the Discussion Forums, try these tips on Discussion Questions That Work.

Talk to your Instructional Facilitator for more ideas or assistance with applying these ideas to your course.  Find these tips and more online in the Online Course Development Support Site.