¶ What is self-reflection and when to use it
Self-reflection is a way of assessing your work based on the intended purpose, acknowledging arising difficulties, and meditating on possible ways for improvement.
Students are encouraged to reflect on their own work after completing a task. This helps to get clear on your intention behind a task and engage critically with the material. In this way, self-reflection promotes self-learning, critical thinking, and developing a deeper understanding of your learnings.
¶ How to start a reflection
There are three ways to engage in a self-reflection depending on your aim.
- You can create a self-reflection by clicking on the '+ Add Activity' button in your timeline, or in your collection view, whenever you want to reflect on any parts of your collection.
- If you want to reflect on a specific activity, you can click on the '...' menu on the top right corner of the activity to start a reflection.
- You might need to complete a pre-defined self-reflection set up by your teacher. This can be found in your timeline and you can just click on it to start the reflection. The activity likely needs to be submitted by a set deadline.
¶ Content selection
A self-reflection can be done on the whole collection or you can select specific content to reflect on. This is initiated by following the first method to create a self-reflection.
¶ Writing a reflection
Writing a reflection should involve the careful review of the guidelines if there is any. Then go through the content selected for reflection. After that, start writing your reflection. Your reflection is automatically saved as a draft invisible to your teacher until you decide to submit it. You can learn more about publishing self-reflection here.
¶ Self-assessment
When it comes to self-assessment in eJournal, you need to be aware of three approaches that can be mixed and matched to fit your workflow:
- General feedback: By default your reflection starts in the 'General' tab, here you have the option to attach a rubric (if available), give yourself a grade, or write narrative feedback. It is important to note that the feedback you leave here is not directly related to a category (learning outcome).
- Category feedback: If you are working with categories, it also makes sense to reflect on your progress in direct relation to those categories. This gives you the opportunity to closely reflect on how you are progressing towards mastering particular learning goals or skills.
This is done via the "+ Category" button, and allows you to use the same structure (e.g., rubric) your teacher would use when evaluating a category, and enables detailed comparisons between your self-reflection and the feedback you have received from your teachers or peers. - Comments: It is also possible to leave a comment directly underneath a particular activity. The advantage of comments is that it is immediately clear which piece of evidence you are referring to, but because comments are simply text (and not structured) like a rubric, they provide little additional insights for your dashboards.
Example on how to perform to provide both general and category feedback:
¶ Teachers can formalize your own feedback
Your supervisors have the ability to use your self-reflection as the basis for their own feedback. This way you could draft some feedback for your teacher to formalize later.
For example, you may start a reflection to capture some (verbal) feedback your teacher gives you in person. Then later on, your teacher can formalize this proposal by publishing it themselves with the click of a button.
¶ Finding self-reflections
Any self-reflections you create can be found in the timeline but also in analytics dashboards.
¶ Timeline
Just like other activities, self-reflections can be found in the timeline once created.
A self-reflection can include any other activities in the timeline. In the example below, a self-reflection is connected to a progress goal, indicated by the purple background connecting the reflection and the progress goal.
¶ Analytics
Self-reflections can also be found on your dashboard.
Self-reflections are seen as an 'Informal' form of feedback, and are labeled as 'Self-reflection'.
This is an example of the average feedback score grouped by role; you will find the self-reflection in purple. It is clear the student is very critical of themselves, as all other roles think they are passing, but the student scores themselves midway between Insufficient and Sufficient.