Does Reflective Practice and Personalised Feedback Foster Learning?

Abstract

Reflective practice is proven as an evidence-based approach in education science. It guides learners to actively engage in critical evaluation of their thoughts, actions, and experience to construct a meaningful framework of understanding. Implementation of reflective practice in learning nurtures students’ self-directed learning to be accountable for their learning journey (Knowles, Gilbourne, Borrie, & Nevill, 2001). Eventually, they can experience deep learning (Parry, Walsh, Larsen, & Hogan, 2012), with the activation of active thinking (Louis & Sutton, 1991) and working memory. The growth of reflective practice requires a high level of attentional control, and metacognition to produce a large spectrum of content knowledge with various mental languages (emotive, volitive, and cognitive). However, the contents of reflective practice have to be guided with personalised feedbacks by the instructors to foster the quality of reflective practice. The instructor has to be catered with the structured rubric of evaluation to provide professional feedback to the student's reflective writing. Therefore, in this study, each reflective writing produced by the student was evaluated based on five categories of the reflective style produced by Bruno & Gilardi (2014).