Assessing the level of student reflection from reflective journals

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Professional Development
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Reflective learning is integral to professional education, bridging theory and practice.
• Despite its acceptance, assessing reflective learning in nursing students lacks standardized methods.
• Existing research is limited by the absence of reliable tools to measure reflection levels.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate coding systems for assessing reflective learning in nursing students' written journals.
• To test the reliability of these coding systems based on established models of reflective thinking.
• To determine the efficacy of content analysis for evaluating student reflection.

Main Methods:

• Content analysis of student reflective journals at two distinct levels.
• Development of coding systems based on two prominent models of reflective thinking.
• Application of coding systems to categorize students' reflective practices.

Main Results:

• Student written journals can reliably indicate the presence or absence of reflective thinking.
• Categorizing students into non-reflector, reflector, and critical reflector levels proved straightforward and reliable.
• Identifying finer levels of reflection within complex models using textual analysis was more challenging and less reliable.

Conclusions:

• Written reflective journals are a viable tool for assessing reflective learning in nursing education.
• A three-tiered categorization (non-reflector, reflector, critical reflector) is a reliable method for evaluating student reflection.
• Further refinement is needed for coding systems to reliably assess more complex levels of reflective thinking.