Stimulating And Developing Reflective Thinking In Undergraduate Students

One of the most important goals of higher education is to teach students how to develop original solutions to complex problems, and to remain open to revising their decisions based upon future good evidence. The ability to do this has been referred to by researchers such as King and Kitchener 1 as Reflective Judgment or Reflective Thinking. At Illinois Institute of Technology, a midsize, private Midwestern university, we are attempting to give the students on our undergraduate, multidisciplinary project teams a stronger base in good decision-making skills through the development of Reflective Thinking. During the Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 semesters, a subset of these students (N = 96 and 102, respectively) completed 3 written assignments per semester that each contained one or two Reflective Thinking questions. Responses to these questions were coded into 3 levels of Reflective Thinking based on the Reflective Judgment Model (RJM) developed by King and Kitchener. 1 We also introduced several interventions during the Spring 2007 semester that were intended to promote Reflective Thinking in our students, and comparisons between Reflective Thinking scores from the Fall 2006 and Spring 2007 semesters suggest that these interventions may have made a difference, although the difference was statistically significant only for the third Reflection, for which there was an average Reflective Thinking level of 1.26 for the Fall of 2006, compared to an average Reflective Thinking level of 1.73 for Spring 2007 (p < .01). Possible factors contributing to the observed differences, as well as other implications of the results and directions for future changes, are discussed.