The revision process has resulted in a simple questionnaire which teachers can use to evaluate their own teaching and the learning approaches of their students.

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Where courses have as an aim the promotion of reflective practice, it will enhance the achievement of the goal if the level of reflective thinking is assessed. To do this in a satisfactory way requires a reliable protocol for assessing the level of reflection in written work. This article presents a protocol that can be used to guide the allocation of work to four categories, namely: habitual action/non-reflection, understanding, reflection, and critical reflection. Intermediate categories can also be used. Detailed descriptors of each category to guide the process are provided. The protocol was tested by four assessors independently using it to grade a set of written work, and very good agreement was obtained. ReflectionMany courses cite goals related to promoting reflective thinking or developing the ability to reflect on practice. This is particularly true in professional degrees. Schön (1983) argued that expert practitioners in a profession were distinguished from novices by their ability to reflect on their practice when dealing with unusual or particularly complex cases. The logical corollary is that, to ensure adequate preparation for a professional career, programmes need to cultivate the ability to reflect on practice (Schön 1987).It is also arguable that all degrees should promote reflective thinking since it is necessary to make reflective judgements to deal with ill-defined problems. This is surely a generic capability that is needed by graduates in knowledge-based societies. The nature of reflectionWhat is perhaps surprising, in spite of the wide interest in reflection and the volumes written about it, is that the concept is ill defined. Formal definitions are not easy to find as has been observed by Atkins and Murphy (1993) and Sparks-Langer et al. (1990) among others. Many write about reflection with the apparent assumption that everyone knows what it is. However, the disparities in terminology, frames of reference, applications and usage make it clear that this assumption is not helpful.There is an element of confusion within the literature because the concept has become so widely and diversely used that it is now found within quite disparate contexts and based on divergent frames of reference. As a result, a number of quite discrete areas of literature

The concept of reflective learning has been widely adopted in many of the nursing curricula today. Reflective learning is of particular relevance to the education of professionals, as it encourages students to integrate theory with practice, appreciate the world on their own behalf, and turn every experience into a new potential learning experience. While nurse educators have widely accepted the educational benefits of reflection, research into reflective learning is hampered by the lack of reliable and widely accepted methods for assessing whether reflection takes place and the level of any reflection. This study attempted to develop and test coding systems for written reflective journals based on two well-known models of reflective thinking. The reflective journals submitted by the students were subjected to content analysis at two levels. The findings of this study suggest that student writing can be used as evidence for the presence or absence of reflective thinking. The process of allocating students to three categories of non-reflector, reflector and critical reflector was straightforward and reliable. Identifying textual elements within journals and allocating them to the finer levels of reflection within a more complex model of reflective thinking was, however, more problematic and considerably less reliable.

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It is now well established that students can hold differing, but readily identifiable, conceptions of learning. This study attempted to discover whether parallel conceptions of teaching can be identified and, if so, whether they are related to student learning outcomes. Initial investigation was through semi‐structured interviews with lecturers at a polytechnic. Constructs identified from the interview transcript were transformed into scales for a questionnaire. Different sets of polytechnic lecturers responded to trial and final versions of the questionnaire. Analysis of the final version of the questionnaire identified two main orientations to teaching — learning facilitation and knowledge transmission — made up of five and four subscales respectively. Mean scores for the two orientations were then computed for 16 departments in two institutions. The departmental scores were found to correlate with data on student learning from longitudinal surveys employing repeated applications of the Study Process Questionnaire. Departments with high scores on knowledge transmission discouraged students from adopting a deep approach to study. Departments in which learning facilitation predominated seemed less likely to induce surface approaches.