Reflective Essays – Engagement in Engineering Education

To provide a framework through which students can create their own process improvement loop during project activity.

Reflective essays are written compositions prepared by students in response to an instructional prompt.

self-regulation, metacognitive awareness

Reflective essays help students develop a broader, more accurate understanding of a thinking process, which permits them to begin developing process-related skills beneficial for industry.
Writing a learning essay before and after each development endeavor provides foundation and practice essential for progress.
with extended prompts and scaffolding, students learn to ask themselves the right questions and check their own comprehension.
Reflective essays assist students in articulating the relationships among their work style, effort, and quality.
Reflective essays require a different approach and structure than a report, and thus can help students improve their analytical skills by forcing them to look at a problem from a different angle.
Reflective essays require them to re-evaluate their previous plan in light of their evaluation and write a new plan for the next project. This approach can help develop a broader, more accurate understanding of the project.

Reflective essays can be a supplementary task to other pedagogies (e.g., mini-projects, discussions, seminar, etc.). They typically consist of a brief essay with prompts on technical and managerial lessons learned.
Other elements employed in reflective essays may include prompting for initial expectations and/or providing an initial survey at the beginning of the semester and a terminal survey at its close.
Reflective essays should be strategically designed to compel students to think through their cognitive processes and devise strategies to improve them.
Reflective essays can be used at the start of the semester to gather information, create expectations, and inquire about how to deal with the objective of a certain course in students’ program of study. At later stages, these essays can be used to obtain feedback regarding students’ teamwork development, thinking processes, and project plans. Other prompts can include beneficial and detrimental tasks that could be adjusted in the future course.
Instructors may choose to provide students with sample essays or guidelines as well as a self-assessment checklist.