Assessing reflective competence through students' journals

Introduction. Since the 1980s, reflexivity has been studied in organizational studies, and has been recognized as a key professional competence into the labour market. Simultaneously, the need to prepare reflexive professionals has increased the emphasis of the necessity of reflexive practice in education: developing students’ capacity for reflexivity is part of developing their capacity to learn how to learn. One of the most used medium for developing and assessing reflexive practice is reflective journal, especially in higher education. Despite the popularity of its use, there is little to no consistency around the process of assessing reflective competence in journals. Objectives. Aim of the study is to propose a methodology for assessing the reflective competence (its presence, its different levels and its development) through the analysis of students’ reflective journals in higher education. Our claim is that mental language can be used as an indicator of reflective competence in written texts, i.e. a lexicon composed by terms that refer to the process of mentalizing. Secondary, the aim is to present a case study in higher education where such a methodology was used, in order to discuss its outcomes, its specific features, advantages and limitations. Methodology. The context of the research is a Master Course in Work and Organizational Psychology. The whole corpus of 20 students’ reflective journals (400 pp.) was considered for a content analysis. The first stage of data analysis was the development of coding criteria and conceptual categories. The second stage of data analysis was the tabulation of code frequencies. Results and Conclusions. The analysis of mental language allows to 1) recognize the presence and the characteristics of writers’ reflective competence and 2) to assess different levels of reflective competence, highlighting how its presence and its levels change through the educational process