What are the effects of regularly implemented student self-reflection?

Seminar Title

What are the effects of regularly implemented student self-reflection?

Student Self-Reflection

10th Grade

High School

Language Arts

All Disciplines

You spent hours over the weekend diligently grading; using the utmost care to ensure you provided detailed, honest, specific and worthwhile feedback to help your students grow. You hand back the graded essays and watch as they hurriedly glance at the score and shove it into their backpack or, worse yet, recycle it without a second thought. Your heart sinks and you think: ‘there must be a better way to get students to not only look at their feedback, but learn from it.’ Been there? I have…more than I would like to admit. The solution? Regularly implemented student self reflection. My research has shown that when students reflect on their learning, they benefit in a multitude of ways aside from being able to take away a meaningful interpretation of their learning and scores. Knowing what they can do with their individual feedback allows students to become aware of a wider picture of their learning patterns and habits, which in turns promotes engagement, self advocacy, motivation, and confidence. Come spend a bit of time learning about the perks of student reflection, best strategies for incorporation, and techniques that can be applied to students of any age and content of any subject.

The question guiding my action research was ‘will regularly implemented self reflection enhance student learning?’ After a review of literature emphasized the direct correlation between reflection and a handful of critical points, I set forth to explore reflection’s effects on three facets of a student’s learning. The first of these is metacognition, the ability to talk and think about their learning as well as to understand the purpose and process of reflection. Secondly I was curious about the relationship between reflection and students ability; their comfortability in front of the class, public speaking skills, and proficiency in academic skills. Lastly I centered my research on the influence reflection has on student progress toward mastery; the influence on overall trend in academics or grades, motivation, organization, attitude and study/practice habits. A review of literature provided insight into the importance of teaching and modeling the skill, noting that it is a life-long attribute that will follow students into adulthood; therefore, being intentional in its introduction is extremely important. Additionally, in order for reflection to be meaningful and beneficial it needs to be incorporated in a purposeful, structured, routine way and students should track their own data in order to begin to be aware of their individual academic needs. Prompted by my literature review, I decided to to examine the relationship between regularly implemented self reflection and student learning in my tenth grade Oral Communications (speech) class. I modified the curriculum to include a series of 6 reflective actions for each major speech conducted by students (5 speeches in total) as well as numerous other weekly and monthly reflective practices. Ultimately, these practices became habitual and students engaged in routine self reflection and validation. They tracked their own data and progress along the way and at the end of the semester all their reflective work culminated in a vlog exploring what area of public speaking they improved the most, struggled the most, and had the most skill in, using video clips from their speeches as support. I discovered that through the use of reflection on their speeches, my tenth grade speech students did show growth over time in the areas of metacognition, overall class performance, public speaking ability, and academic progress. They took a more active role in their learning, understanding themselves as learners, able to decipher their own learning needs and ask for help or make changes as needed. They also learned to recognize and identify their own strengths and weaknesses and work towards mastering them, leading them to become confident in their ability to improve their own outcomes and performances.