Evidence of reflective thinking across the curriculum: college experience versus individual courses

Abstract

This study investigated how individual and course-level variables across the curriculum at a four-year college (college here refers to a higher education institution that offers undergraduate education but not graduate degrees) in the southeastern US impacted student reflective thinking as measured by Kember and colleagues' [2000. Development of a questionnaire to measure the level of reflective thinking. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 25(4): 381–395] scale. The measure includes four constructs: (1) non-thinking (i.e., habitual action), (2) understanding, (3) reflection, and the deepest level (4) critical reflection. The construct of understanding – students' assessment of their thoughtful use of knowledge – was the only measure that increased with credit hours completed. Students (n = 802) reported more thinking to comprehend in science courses compared to business and humanities courses. An interaction of subject areas and gender showed that males reported more reflection in business courses than the humanities or science courses, and females reported the opposite (i.e., more reflection in humanities and science courses and less in business courses). All students, and especially older ones, were more likely to report thinking habits as the result of an overall college experience than from an individual course. A small set (6.23%), however, who did not report reflecting critically as the result of college did indicate that the current course prompted them to do so. Deeper habits of thinking were reported in students who were awarded course credit for participation and for those enrolled in courses taught by more experienced faculty.

Keywords:

• assessment
• critical reflection
• critical thinking
• questioning
• reflective thinking
• transformative learning

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to David Biek, Alicia David, Greg George, Thom Harrison, Matt Jennings, Teri Miller, Barry Monk, William Ochs, Simone Phipps, Christine Rigsby, Malav Shah, Tom Stevens, Steve Taylor and Monica Youngzook for assistance in collecting student responses. For helpful comments, I am also indebted to David Biek, Teri Miller, Simone Phipps, Maggie Renken, Christine Rigsby, John Trimboli, the associate editor and three anonymous reviewers. For editorial assistance, I am indebted to my best friend and husband, Bob Sargent.

Notes

1 College here refers to a higher education institution that offers undergraduate education but not graduate degrees.

2 Seventeen faculty were invited to participate via email with a brief description of the goals of the project. One faculty member did not respond. Two faculty members who agreed to participate did not submit their data at the end of the semester.

3 Some students were enrolled in more than one of the courses selected for this study (98/802 or 12.2%). Since the study asks about particular courses, these duplicates were not deleted.

4 The institution would be considered ‘less competitive’ among US colleges, with an admission acceptance rate of 69%, and 10% enrollment in one or more learning support courses.

5 Because I used two analyses, the Bonferroni adjustment of alpha level was used for determination of statistical significance, p = .025 (.05/2).

6 In order to ensure good statistical power, the student variables that were insignificant in the earlier ANCOVA were omitted.