Language characteristics of reflective writing

Background: The development and assessment of graduate attributes of engineering students is receiving increasing attention. Changing expectations of accreditation institutions such as Engineers Australia and EurACE, from requiring opportunities for students to develop attributes, to requiring all graduates to demonstrate attributes are one of the drivers. Concurrently TEQSA, in administering their Act will be looking for providers to demonstrate outcomes that employers are seeking. One way that some educators are assisting students to develop and demonstrate graduate attributes is to partake in reflective practice and, in particular, the use of reflective writing as evidence of learning and graduate attribute development. Among the various issues that face educators in moving towards greater use of reflective writing, the trend towards larger class sizes and the casualization of the teaching workforce presents problems of training relatively inexperienced staff to provide feedback on, and conduct assessment of, reflective writing. This issue is exacerbated if there are multiple tutors for one cohort of students where equity of assessment of free form writing is important but difficult to achieve. Purpose: The purpose of our program of research is to assist engineering educators to prescribe and assess reflective writing. In particular we wish to answer the questions 'How do students exhibit cognition in writing tasks? ' and 'How do students exhibit affectivity in writing tasks? '. The work reported here is a subset of that research into how students use language in those tasks. Design/Method: A large body of reflective writing from 1st year tertiary students studying a subject on sustainability and human-environment interaction were analysed using language-parsing software. The intent of the analysis was to search for the types of verb phrases students use when writing about cognitive understanding and affective behaviour. Over 3,500 journal entries were analysed. These phrases were linked to verbs educators use to describe student performance in the cognitive and affective domains. Verbs were used because they indicate that the student has taken some action, or that they were describing action taken by others. From within the subset of verbs used in the student writing, a classification was made to divide them into verbs describing personal action on the part of the student and those reporting the action of others. Results: The analysis showed that there was not good alignment between the verbs commonly used by educational researchers to describe student action and the verbs the students used in their writing. It also showed that the vast majority of the verbs written were to describe the actions of others, even though the journals were intended for reflective writing. Conclusions: The use of the language parsing software proved to be very effective in quickly displaying instances and statistics on word use in a very large corpus of writing. There would be value in creating a set of verbs that students use to describe their own actions, and in analysing the information provided to students. This could assist in giving guidance to assessors of the student work.