Structured Reflections

Vol. 4 2025

Donna Vinton

Abstract

I provided graduate students with flexible reflection categories. With these scaffolds, students’ written discussions moved from regurgitation and summarizing, to thoughtful reflection.

     In a graduate course I taught, entitled Assessment in Postsecondary Education, I supported students in sharing personal reactions to course readings, by providing students with a structure for their written products. Assessment in Postsecondary Education is a 16-week, required course, in the Post Secondary Education: Student Affairs program for students pursuing a master’s degree. A goal of the course is to increase students’ awareness of the value of assessment, in higher education. My students were recent bachelor’s degree graduates with limited experience in higher education positions, other than part-time jobs on our campus, or student organization experiences.

     Reflection is foundational to comprehending and retaining knowledge (Veine, et al., 2019). However, In the many undergraduate and graduate courses I have taught, I have found, despite the amount of reflection that students are required to do, they often wrestle with the process. Students tend to report, rather than reflect on, what they read or did. Students may take on what might be thought of as the “professor voice, “textbook author voice” or “expert voice,” basically echoing what they read or heard in class, to assert how a particular activity or issue ought to be carried out or acted upon. 

     Students flounder with the entire reflection process, turning in writing that is unduly brief, hoping they have done enough to receive an acceptable grade. Providing structure advances equity, in higher education, Wu et al. (2025), and to counteract students’ difficulty with reflection, I provided reflection categories to scaffold students’ success.

“Reflection is a learning-making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas.” (Rogers, 2002, p. 845)

      Though one of Assessment in Postsecondary Education’s lessons is on alternative assessment data collection methods, many of our topics are stated as analogies, lending well to reflecting. For example: Assessment As Arcade Basketball, Assessment As a State Of Mind, Assessment as Celebration. Other topics consist of comparisons and self-evaluation, which also are well-suited for eliciting reflections: Taking a Look at Differences Between Research, Assessment, and Evaluation; How to Differentiate Assessment, Evaluation, and Research; Assessing Your Approach to Assessment. For each of these topics, and others, students are required to write a reflections piece, usually two pages in length.

The First Class

     During the first class period of the semester, students are guided through a structured approach to reflection that is a modified version of the structure that, later, students will use the first nine weeks of the course. On the first day, students receive a handout with a one-page excerpt, from a book on assessment. Students also view symbols to represent a reader’s reactions to an author’s thoughts. On the margins of the excerpt from the text, students put a symbol that represents their reaction to a sentence or passage. This exercise provides a low key prelude, to using reflection categories.

     

     Students shared their reactions, as part of group discussion, explaining what caused their reactions. In addition, I showed students three different reflections that I wrote, in reaction to the excerpt, to illustrate length and content for written reflections students would do in following weeks.

During the Semester

     For the first nine weeks of our 16-week course, students are provided with a list of reflection categories students can use to support their reflections, on course readings.  

Table 2
Reflection Categories – Examples

. Utility – You can use currently or in the future
. Connections – With your current or past classes or experiences
. Dissonance – Concepts or narratives do not fit with your current or past experiences
. For Further Thought –
Questions, perspectives, or concepts you want to further examine. 
 . Adjective of Your Choice – The most (interesting, helpful, confusing, satisfying and/or adjective of your choice) thing that you took from the readings. 

     The most often used reflection categories have been Connections, Utility, Frameworks for Thought, and open topics. Examples of open topics students have used include “Information I’ll use for job interviews”, “Something that made me think”, “Something that alarmed me”, “Something that made me say YES!”, “Best article I ever read!”, “Something I’d like to try”, and “Getting it!”

Students submit their reflections and receive feedback comments from me, as well as formative assessment with a rubric.

     My first impression, upon newly implementing the reflections categories scaffold, was a purely personal one—the reflections are fun for me to read and easily invite my responses in return. I am seeing students’ thoughts that are more personalized and more in-depth in their handling of topics than what I had seen, overall, in previous years of the class. I have observed evidence that students were finding information that affected their thinking and offered ideas they could use.

     Aside from analyzing students’ use of the reflections categories, I distributed to students a post-course evaluation, based on an evaluation instrument Student Assessment of Their Learning Gains (SALG). Below are student responses to selected survey items, the year before I used the reflections categories, compared to the year I used the new reflections approach.The instrument asks “How much gain have you made?”

Table 3
Percent of Students Who Checked “Great Gain”

	Year Prior to Reflection Categories	Year of Reflection Categories
How studying this subject helps people address real world issues.	33%	62%
How assessment connects with your previous experiences inside or outside of Student Affairs.	28%	54%
Enthusiasm for the subject.	17%	38%

     For deeper learning to occur, learning that is retained and can be used beyond the classroom – reflection is essential (For Deeper Learning, 2025). To promote reflection in higher education, various formats have been proposed: reflection journals, reflective pre-assessments, and reflective post-assessments (Tanner, 2012). However, within these formats, students often falls short of actual reflection; and guidance to educators for how to elicit students’ reflections has been missing (Mann, et al., 2009). Providing reflection categories to students, as a stepping stone on the way to students’ creating their own, internal structures, has been effective in supporting my students in connecting course topics to their personal thoughts and experiences.

      

References

For Deeper Learning (2025). What is Deeper Learning? https://fordeeperlearning.org/deeper-learning-defined/

Mann, K., Gordon, J., & MacLeod, A. (2009). Reflection and reflective practice in health professions education: A systematic review. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 14, 595-621. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10459-007-9090-2

Rodgers, C. (2002). Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking. Teachers college record, 104(4), 842-866. 

Tanner, K. D. (2012). Promoting student metacognition. CBE Life Sciences Education, 11(2), 113–120.

Veine, S., Anderson, M. K., Andersen, N. H., Espenes, T. C., Søyland, T. B., Wallin, P., & Reams, J. (2019). Reflection as a core student learning activity in higher education – Insights from nearly two decades of academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 25(2), 147–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2019.1659797

Wu, J., Guzman, L., Patt, C., Eppig, A., Mendoza-Denton, R. (2025). Can program structure advance equity in graduate education? Innovative Higher Education.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-025-09808-x

Donna Vinton, PhD in Higher Education Administration from the University of Iowa, served at the University of Northern Iowa in administrative positions and taught several undergraduate and graduate courses, primarily for the College of Education. Dr. Vinton can be reached at donna.vinton@uni.edu.