During the past decade, "reflection" and "reflective writing" have become familiar terms and practices in medical education. The authors of this article argue that the use of the terms requires more thoughtfulness and precision, particularly because medical educators ask students to do so much reflection and reflective writing. First, the authors discuss John Dewey's thoughts on the elements of...

This paper describes how SWoRD (scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline), a web-based reciprocal peer review system, supports writing practice, particularly for large content courses in which writing is considered critical but not feasibly included. To help students gain content knowledge as well as writing and reviewing skills, SWoRD supports the whole cycle of writing, reviews, bac...

We tested the hypothesis that engagement in a few, brief writing assignments in a nonmajors science course can improve student ability to convey critical thought about science. A sample of three papers written by students (n = 30) was coded for presence and accuracy of elements related to scientific writing. Scores for different aspects of scientific writing were significantly correlated, sugge...

This study examined the role of self-monitoring support for writing skill improvement in a reciprocal peer review of writing system called SWoRD (Cho & Schunn, 2007). Because self-monitoring has been identified as a critical component in self-regulated learning (Butler & Winne, 1995; Cresswell, 2000; Zimmerman & Risemberg, 1997), students were provided with opportunities to self-monitor their w...

BACKGROUND To facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and to make connections between patients' diseases and their social/cultural contexts, the study examined whether the use of heterogeneous cluster grouping in reflective writing for medical humanities literature acquisition could have positive effects on medical university students in terms of empathy, critical thinking, and reflective wr...