Development of a Rubric to Evaluate Student Reflection Essays in a Clinical Physiology Course

Reflection as a learning technique may be an important strategy for long‐term retention of information. In this study, investigators used a descriptive design to analyze student reflective writings in a two‐course clinical physiology series. In this course series, students completed multiple‐choice exams, first as individuals and second in inter‐disciplinary student groups (biology, physiology, nursing anesthesia and biomedical engineering). Student groups must discuss each question until the group reaches a consensus on the answer. Following the exam students write reflection essays on three exam questions of their choosing. For this assignment, students are encouraged to pick questions that were particularly difficult or that inspired a lot of group discussion. Students were instructed to write about their thought process for choosing their answer and how the group discussion influenced how they thought about the question. The course instructor, also an investigator, collected student writings over a two‐year period, compiled and de‐identified the essays and organized essays according to exam and semester. The course instructor and a student co‐investigator worked as a team to analyze student writings for levels of reflection. First, the investigators adapted a previously published reflection rubric (Hoffman, Shew, Vu, Brokaw & Frankel, 2016) using student writing from the academic year 2015–2016. The investigators analyzed writings separately using the rubric and then met to discuss the essays, reconcile their individual ratings, and revise the rubric as inconsistencies were discovered. In this way, the original rubric was tested and refined. The adapted rubric is a check list of desired essay components: good writing (spelling, grammar, focus), individual reflection, articulation of group process, use of references and insights about future learning. Once a final version of the rubric was agreed upon, the revised reflection rubric was used to evaluate student writings from the academic year 2016–2017 for inter‐rater reliability. There was no correlation between student exam scores and ratings of reflection; this was an unexpected result. Currently the rubric is being used in the 2017–2018 course series to guide student reflection writings. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .