Assessing reflective competence through students’ journals

Reflective competence is a primary requirement for practitioners. This emphasis has brought about a rethinking of educational process for professional development. One of the most used medium to develop reflective competence is a reflective journal or diary, especially in higher education. Our aim is to evaluate the feasibility of a coding scheme to categorize the characteristics of students’ reflective practice through the analysis of mental language used within their journals. We present a case study in higher education where we used such a method in order to explore how the students’ reflective practice emerged, how it evolved through time and how its different levels were embodied within the different phases of an educational setting.