Abstract:

Reflection is a cognitive process that helps students to learn from their own learning experience. This implies thinking about the course of the learning process in order to enable better actions in the future. Reflection is more efficient if it is supported by technological tools. These tools can offer the ability to present detailed information about the learning process (e.g., use of time for specific tasks) and offer the ability to provide guidance, for example in the form of reflective questions. In this paper, we present results of a study carried out with 9th grade (mean age 15.0) students (n=67) in order to clarify the role of a Reflection Tool to support students’ reflection. The Reflection Tool is a web-based application that was tailored for chemistry-based Inquiry Learning Space (ILS) called “What does pH measure?”. The ILS and Reflection Tool were developed as a part of the EU funded project Go-Lab (see www.go-lab-project.eu). The study involved two conditions. In one condition the Reflection Tool was applied (experimental group) and in the other condition it was not (control group). Assessment of the Reflection Tool relied on coding the response to an open-ended reflective question. Two aspects were assessed in students’ reflections: content (technical, situational and sensitising) and reflection level (description, justification, critique, dialogue and transfer). Coding was performed by two researchers and inter-rater reliability of their results was determined using Cohen’s kappa. In case of reflection levels Cohen’s Kappa value was 0.715 and in case of reflection contents 0.672. We conducted a Mann-Whitney U-test and the results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in favour of the condition where the reflection tool was used. We discuss possible interpretations of this result.

Keywords:

Reflection, web-based learning environments, web-based applications, inquiry-based learning.