Reflective Learning and its Impact on Formative and Summative Assessments

Introduction

Reflective learning is a way of reflecting on the experience of learning. It then helps a student or a researcher to know about the experience better and learn more values from it (Colomer et al., 2020). Reflecting on the experiences has many approaches. One of the most popular approaches is the Gibbs Reflective Cycle. The cycle goes through six stages to pen down an experience in a detailed manner (Sekarwinahyu et al., 2019). Feedback and feedforward are one of the best ways to manage the performance of a person. The usage of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle can be very helpful in making a good reflective approach to feedback and feedforward. This helps a lot in improving the performance and creating better formative and summative assessed work. This essay aims to describe the importance of reflective learning and cover an efficient approach to feedback and feedforward to bring effective results during the formative and summative assessment.

The thesis statement of the study is that reflective learning is an effective tool for improving performance during formative and summative assessments.

Body

Reflection is the penning down the experience of something and learning from it in the process. Through this approach a person, student or researcher can know him or her better, by understanding the thought processes and actions that were taken during the experience. Gibbs's reflective cycle goes through six stages in making a reflective approach. They are namely the- description, analysis, feelings, action plan, evaluation and conclusion (Ezezika and Johnston, 2022). By going through the six stages, the reflective cycle enables a person to explore and evaluate the experience in great detail. The description of the reflective cycle asks a person to go pen down the whole situation in detail (Pieper et al., 2021). This detail makes a person cover almost every area of the experience and therefore creates an image of what has happened. By doing so, the reflection gets a clear outline of the subject about which the evaluation will be done. The approach asks to cover the feelings about the experience in the next step. By covering this, a person comes to know about the feelings and emotions that took part in the thought process during the experience (Li et al., 2020). This is an essential part of making a good approach towards reflecting on something, as feelings and thought processes are the basis of a person's action. The next stage of evaluation covers the positive and negative aspects of the experience (Ardian et al., 2019). Being objective and honest is very important in covering this stage. By doing so, the learning from the reflection becomes better. As the person comes to know about the good and bad things about the experience, it enables him or her to understand what went well and what did not go with the actions that were taken. The analysis of the experience is the main step that makes the person learn by making sense of the experience of the situation. By doing so, understanding of the experience becomes better, which then can be utilised in taking better actions for the future. The conclusion is the next step that is essential in concluding the experience and everything that took part in it (Dhaliwal et al., 2018). This makes a person in making more sense of the experience by realising what else could have been done in making the experience better. Finally, the action plan is made to pen down the actions that can be taken if the same situation comes in future, which can help in making the experience better (The University of Edinburgh, 2022). By making use of all the six steps, the Gibbs Reflective Cycle serves as an efficient approach toward reflection and learning from it.

Feedback is created by focussing on the past. These are static. To do feedback properly, knowledge about past actions is required in order to properly analyse them (Sabarun, 2019). By aligning what needs to happen and what has happened, the analysing of the situation gets better with the usage of feedback. The performance can be judged, which helps in understanding the gaps better that took place. Feedbacks are usually negative. The nature of feedback is taken to a personal level to make the person realise the mistakes that were done. It slightly enables to infuse the feeling of failure into the person who receives the feedback. The nature of it is directly associated with judgement. Feedforward is focused on the future. It is aimed at making a person or an organisation understand the past and make a change to perform better in the future. The focus of creating feedforwards is creating solutions rather than judging the actions of the past alone (Reimann et al., 2019). Its nature is positive. The creation of feedforwards is aimed at improving the efficiency of a person in the activity that is being done or is supposed to be done in the future. Its nature is not completely based upon judgement and provides opportunities for an entity to change. The usage of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle on creating a reflection on the feedback and feedforwards can be extremely effective in improving the performance of a person. Feedback is aimed at making a person understand the mistakes and errors that were done in the past (Dupri and Nazirun, 2020). The usage of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle in creating a reflection upon it will enable a student to understand it better. The description of the approach can be used in describing the feedback in detail. By doing the analysis and evaluation, the understanding of the feedback becomes better. It then can be used in finding the cons and making sense of the gaps that were created during the past actions. Creating reflection upon feedforwards can greatly help the performance of a person in the future. As the nature of the feedforwards is mainly solution-based, a better understanding of them by using reflective methods (Faulconer et al., 2021). Describing, evaluating and analysing the points that are being made in the feedforwards can help a person in implementing them better. This process can be facilitated better using the action plan of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle.

Formative and summative assessments are effective ways of evaluating performance during and after learning. The usage of a reflective approach in understanding the feedback and feedforwards can greatly improve the implementation of the judgements and the solutions in taking action. Formative assessments deal with the evaluation during the process of learning (Lee et al., 2020). Using the reflective approach greatly enables the efficiency of a student in utilising the judgements and solutions in understanding and improving the actions that are being taken in the present. Monitoring the learning gets better by adopting a reflective approach. As describing the solutions and making an evaluation of them becomes better, a student will be able to implement them easily to mend his assessment works. Reflective approaches are aimed at better understanding the self skills and abilities (Lapina, 2018). Feedback and feedforwards are aimed at analysing and directing the actions of the past and future respectively. As the reflective approach towards them makes their implementation and understanding better, the learning process during the summative assessment gets a big boost. With the utilisation of feedback in the ongoing process of learning, the skills to understand the instructions for the actions get better. Analysing the judgements in feedback makes a student understand the goals and objectives in the process of learning. As formative assessments are aimed at doing it in phases, the areas of learning are covered with greater acknowledgement. Summative assessments are done after the whole process of learning gets completed (Dolin et al., 2018). The work that is being done for it greatly relies on the improvement done during the formative assessments. Application of the ideas that were built during the process of reflection gets better with an efficient approach of it. Summative assessment works hold high value as it determines the result after the whole process of learning (Broadbent et al., 2018). With the usage of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle in the understanding of the feedback and feedforwards, the implementation of the learning gets better upon the summative assessment works. It evaluates the achievements of a student after the end of the learning. The works related to it, carry the knowledge and learning of the whole course. For making the assessment work fruitful in delivering the desired results, the application of the feedback and feedforwards holds high importance. The reflective approach of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle will greatly aid a student in understanding them and will facilitate a student in appropriately implementing the judgements and solutions.

Conclusion

Reflection work is done to learn from the experience of anything. For students, it is an important way to educate themselves from their learning experience. Improvement of skills and knowledge is an important part of learning. Utilising the feedback and the feedforwards are essential steps to make improvements in the course and end of learning. A reflective approach upon them increases the efficiency of their utilisation, where the Gibbs Reflective Cycle serves as an effective tool to do that. With the application of the approach, the performance can be greatly improved by utilising the judgements and solutions of the feedback and feedforwards respectively. This becomes a very important tool in improving performance during formative and summative assessments. As the formative assessments are an evaluation process that takes place during the learning, improvements are important in it to get effective results during the summative assessments, which take place at the end.

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