A new study in the Journal of College Science Teaching provides and validates a rubric to help science instructors identify incremental progress in non-majors鈥 development of reflection skills during a single course or other short-term experience.
Jessica Merricks, associate professor of biology, and Kelsey Bitting, assistant professor of environmental studies, recently published the article 鈥溾 in the聽Journal of College Science Teaching.
Reflection as a process helps students better understand themselves with respect to content and experiences they encounter in required science courses taken to fulfill distribution requirements, making that content more meaningful and more likely to shape students鈥 thinking and engagement in science-related topics as citizens. However, students may not arrive in the science classroom with the skills and habits of mind that lead to transformative insights via the reflective process, and tracking that skill development can allow instructors to tailor instruction about reflection according to students鈥 current understanding and practice. Nonetheless, Merricks and Bitting discovered that existing reflective writing instruments lacked the nuance to detect subtle shifts in students鈥 development across units in a single semester.
Using a dataset of students鈥 end-of-unit reflections in an introductory-level environmental science course serving mostly non-majors, Merricks and Bitting developed a refined rubric that recognized and codified incremental differences in student reflective thinking along the path to reflective writing. This analysis revealed that students frequently expressed personal connections to content and noted shifts in their perspective, even as they were still working to master the details of related scientific concepts.
The authors believe this instrument can help science instructors communicate about the goals and levels of reflection to students and allow them to recognize and encourage increasing reflective depth in student work across the progress of a single semester.
Support was provided by 黑料不打烊鈥檚 Center for Writing Excellence via a CWE Pedagogy Grant to Merricks in 2021 and a writing residency completed by Merricks in 2023.