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Reflection is widely posited as a professional practice and process that supports students to learn through experience. Effective reflection for learning through experience requires a high level of introspection and open-minded self-analysis, a capacity for abstract learning, and self-regulation and agency that few students in higher education innately possess. Reflection can, however, be learnt and taught through strategic interventions and careful scaffolding. This paper outlines a new framework for scaffolding reflection for learning through experience. The framework was developed by the authors as a scaffolding aid to develop teachers' ability to effectively incorporate reflection into experience-based learning curriculum in higher education. The authors contend that scaffolding reflection during each of four learning phases will positively contribute to learning through experience.

Reflective practice is widely adopted across the field of experience-based learning subjects in higher education, including practicums, work-integrated learning, internships, service learning and community participation. This adoption of reflective practice implies that it supports student learning through experience. When reviewing the evidence for the role of reflection for learning, it became evident that not only was there no clear agreement about the definition of reflection, there has been little theoretical development in this area. An integrated participatory action research and ecological approach was adopted to build a theory about the ecology of reflection for learning through experience. Through this process the assumptions, or truths that are taken for granted, that underpin the new theory were declared and substantiated. Key concepts and the principle tenets of the theory were then identified and defined, leading to an overview of the ecologies of the learner, the learning context and the experiential learning context.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to build on the foundational theories of personality and motivation to explore the role of competitiveness and of ethnicity in relation to student academic performance. Survey data from 328 students across four sites (Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong and Korea) provided self-rated responses to items measuring personality, motivation, competitiveness and ethnicity. Design/methodology/approach Stepwise multiple regression was used to identify the variables that predicated student academic performance, including testing for interaction effect of ethnicity. Both student self-reported data and independently assessed performance measures were used to avoid common method variance. Findings This study affirmed that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are significantly associated with academic performance. The personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism are significantly associated with a student’s competitiveness. The interaction of competitiveness and ethnicity is significantly and positively associated with performance. Research limitations/implications The variable of student competitiveness requires further research to better understand its role in academic performance. Researching ethnicity at the micro level allows the acknowledgement and investigation of “intra-national diversity” (Tung, 2008; Tung and Baumann, 2009). Originality/value This study is original in its approach in that it combines the concepts of motivation, personality, competitiveness and ethnicity in relation to student academic performance. While previous studies have explored these concepts individually and often at the macro level, a crucial contribution of this study is that competitiveness and ethnicity (as opposed to national culture) are examined at a micro level. The authors demonstrate the combined importance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (carrot and stick) in driving performance and introduce the new motivation, competitiveness and performance model which recognises that competitiveness, as a driver of performance, is moderated by the learners’ ethnicity.

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