Tip: Planning for Student Reflection

Closing the semester with opportunities for students to reflect on their growth.

Engaging students in reflection about their growth at the end of the semester is important for several reasons. First, it allows them to take stock of what they have learned and achieved over the course of the semester. This can be a valuable exercise in building their self-awareness and self-confidence, and can help them to identify areas where they need to improve. Engaging in reflection can also help students to develop a sense of ownership over their learning. By encouraging them to think critically about their own progress and development, they are empowered to take an active role in their education and to take responsibility for their own learning. There are two opportunities I use to get students to engage in this type of metacognition (thinking about their own thinking).

“Le Penseur” (The Thinker), sculpture by Auguste Rodin, photo by author

Course Evaluations

If you are at an institution that lets you add questions to the standard student course evaluations, you might be thinking about what you might like to ask your students this semester. If you don’t have the option to add questions to the evaluations, I think there are some excellent reasons why conducting your own evaluations is beneficial. Certainly, there are overarching philosophical issues with student evaluations, such as gender bias and racial/ethnic bias, evidence that students give worse ratings to professors whose courses provide the most long-term impact and that students cannot discern what actually makes good teaching, among other criticisms. Even when we receive mostly positive evaluations from our students, the assessments can be less than helpful. The questions asked on standard evaluations often don't give us the right kind of feedback we need to improve, and sometimes the results come in too late to make a real difference in the next term.

That being said, I do appreciate hearing from my students and always want to find ways to improve the course. To gather this information, I typically ask my students to fill out an end-of-semester course survey that I personalize for each class. The survey has different types of questions, from multiple-choice to short-answer to longer responses. If you're curious, you can take a peek at the survey link here (which will ask you to make a copy).

In these surveys, I make sure to ask if they have any additional thoughts or feedback they'd like to share, with questions like: Is there anything that you feel I should know about your performance this semester that might have helped you be even more successful?

Beyond helping me by sharing their insights and reflections, I hope that completing the survey provides students with an important opportunity to reflect on their own progress in the course. Taking a moment to reflect on the semester can help them identify strategies that worked well for them, and articulate where their efforts were not enough.

Other opportunities for reflection

Sometimes, I include a reflection question at the end of the final exam, such as:

• Did you give your best effort this semester? Why or why not?

• Were the strategies, skills and procedures you used effective for this course?

• What are some things you did really well this semester?

• If you could do this course over, what would you do differently?

• What class activities or assignments helped you learn the most?

• What did you learn this semester, and is it important?

• What do you think you'll remember most about this class in 10 years?

I have also asked students to share their insights by writing a letter to future students offering tips and advice for succeeding in the course. Here’s one example of what those future student letters can look like, from Cindy Moss's Math 201 class. I like this strategy because it encourages current students to reflect on the semester they have just completed, and it nudges future students to start the semester in a reflective frame of mind as I share the letters their predecessors have written.

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How do you offer students opportunities for reflection?

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Thanks for reading!

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