Principal Investigator: Nazih El-Bezre, Lecturer, The School of Journalism, Writing, and Media
Project description
Recent studies have pointed out that online learning during Covid-19 has had a negative impact on first year university students’ reflective thinking (e.g., Farahian et al., 2021). They have also suggested that these students’ reflective writing tends to be superficial. In a demanding, exam-heavy curriculum, setting aside time for reflection may not be a priority for busy students. To help these students benefit from the well-established usefulness of reflective learning (Yancey, 2016), it is imperative for instructors to emphasize the impactful role reflective writing can play in enhancing students’ critical abilities. This is necessitated by the fact that many students do not even read the feedback from their instructors on their assignment and exams (e.g., Laflen & Smith, 2017). This makes reflective learning/writing doubly important.
Research questions
- What genre and rhetorical aspects of writing do students focus on in their reflective writing?
- Do students problem-solve rhetorical goals? Do they even formulate goals?
- Do students write about the purpose of their writing?
- Does reflective writing seem to give the students insights into the form, rhetoric, process, and subject-matter knowledge that form the dimensions of genre knowledge about which the students are writing?