SUMMARY This article details the development over eight years of an assessment process, which encourages the use of creative processes to facilitate reflective learning. The advantages of the seven stages of the assessment in promoting deep reflective learning are outlined and the conditions needed to promote the process of reflection are considered. INTRODUCTION This article provides an account of the experience of designing two reflective learning assessments and of running the workshops on a part-time action learning MBA at which these assessments took place. It gives an account of how the assessment workshops encouraged the use of creative processes to promote reflection and resulted in reflections from participants such as: “The things …show more content…
If reflective learning were not assessed, there was the possibility that participants would neglect it. The function of these reflective learning assessments was to ensure that the importance of reflection as a key learning tool in professional education (Schon 1991, Bines & Watson 1992), was formally acknowledged. The team also envisaged a process that would be exhilarating and exciting in itself as well as a vehicle for reflective learning. The definition of reflection that guided our thinking was “those intellectual and affective activities in which individuals engage to explore their experiences in order to lead to new understandings and appreciations.” (Boud et al, 1985). There were also key stages in the process of reflection that needed to be incorporated into the assessment. Participants should be able to give a comprehensive account of their learning process, the learning that resulted and be able to identify the key features of that experience (Boud et al, 1985). They also needed to examine their feelings as they related to their learning and understand how learning had affected them and how they themselves had affected their learning. The process of reflection should …show more content…
There were assessment processes to evaluate learning in the area of each subject discipline. These reflective learning assessments would focus on what participants had learned about their learning process. No participant would do better or worse than another by virtue of her/his unique learning experience. In the light of what we understood about the process of reflective learning, the following assessment criteria were drawn up. The reflection should: • Provide evidence of analysis that goes beyond description so that key events and the significance of them could be highlighted. • Be an honest reflection, demonstrated by internal consistency and assessed against peer knowledge of the individual concerned to encourage participants to tell the real story of their learning, rather than present what they thought we might want to hear. • Show learning and the application of learning to connect their experiences to what was already known. • Demonstrate a shift in perception and perspective shown through insight to develop changed perspectives. • Communicate the learning experience to others to enable them to share