Abstract
Reflective thinking is a key skill for constructing meaning in university. Its development requires appropriate learning contexts which can function as spaces for reflection, along with approaches, conditions and methods which can boost students’ training in thinking, framed within their process of knowledge construction and their development of competencies and professional skills. This paper reports the development and testing of a questionnaire on the value of the learning contexts designed to foster reflective thinking. To ensure validity, the constructs measured were derived from the extensive literature on conditions for planning learning and teaching activities for reflective thinking based on narrative-based methods. The instrument was validated with a sample of students (n = 375) from five universities. The results obtained from the estimation of a 10–factor model offer appropriate goodness of fit and parsimony with acceptable and consistent indices of reliability. The results contribute to the evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the questionnaire and confirm the value of the model’s components for devising higher education teaching activities to promote a reflective thinking process.
Highlights
Higher education, which has always been influenced by the reflective tradition [1], lays increasing stress on the development of reflective skills—“twenty–first century skills” [2] for students’ acquisition of professional skills [3,4,5,6,7]
Reflection requires training, effective habits, appropriate learning spaces [15], learning environments [16,17] and even a culture of thinking in the classroom [18]. Aimed at addressing this concern, the present article is the result of a research project in university teaching (REDICE16–1660) which centred on studying the value of activities based on the narrative approach [19,20] for fostering reflective thinking around what was learnt, students’ own learning processes and their development of competencies and professional skills [21]
The mean ranges from a maximum of 3.95 for the variable awareness of learning and a minimum of 2.91 for teacher role, and the distribution of responses for the variables does not exceed a standard deviation except for the variable levels of reflective thinking, with an ST = 1.02
Summary
Higher education, which has always been influenced by the reflective tradition [1], lays increasing stress on the development of reflective skills—“twenty–first century skills” [2] for students’ acquisition of professional skills [3,4,5,6,7]. Reflection requires training, effective habits, appropriate learning spaces [15], learning environments [16,17] and even a culture of thinking in the classroom [18] Aimed at addressing this concern, the present article is the result of a research project in university teaching (REDICE16–1660) which centred on studying the value of activities based on the narrative approach [19,20] for fostering reflective thinking around what was learnt, students’ own learning processes and their development of competencies and professional skills [21]. This article presents the process and results of the validation of this instrument, which measures students’ opinions on the value of narrative methods and the learning contexts designed to develop reflective thinking
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