By Iain Wilson
Introduction
In Part 1, you were introduced to how your research methods learning can be applied to preparing for a reflective assessment and support reflective practice. It showed how you can identify development needs in yourself, similar to how you would identify gaps in the research. It also demonstrated how setting development aims/goals, helps inform what experiences will be appropriate for your development. Just as you would expect a research question or hypothesis would inform the methods appropriate to answering it. In this article, you will be exploring what to do with your ‘data’ once you have completed engaging with your experiences. You will be drawing upon your knowledge and understanding of results and discussion sections of a research report, and applying this to your reflective assessments and practice.
Analysing the data
Each experience that you have, which you can reflect upon, is data which you can analyse to help identify patterns in your own behaviours and performance. “If my experiences are the data, then that means my reflections are the analyses!”. That’s right, making sense of your experiences through reflection is the same as making sense of the patterns in your data by conducting your analyses.
Now that you have your data, it is time to analyse it. In a results section, you should start with preliminary and/or descriptive analyses. These provide the context of your data, such as describing the demographics of your participants. This provides the foundations of understanding your main analyses and helps you interpret the main patterns that you observe. For a reflection, this is describing the experience. To start with you need to outline the experience, providing sufficient details to have a good understanding of the context. This includes where the experience took place, who was involved, what your specific role was, what the outcome of the experience was and any other contextual information you think will be valuable for your evaluation. By doing this, not only do you know the outcome of your experience, but you also have details and context of the outcome, which will help you to draw plausible conclusions. Discussing this with a critical friend can also be beneficial, similar to how you do quality checks on your data, such as assumption checks and transcribing your own data.
Once you have the context of your experience, you are able to start looking for patterns in your data, similar to when you conduct main analyses. This step involves looking at your experience with a critical eye and deconstructing. This is to try and understand what aspects of the experience contributed to the outcome, as well as thinking about any psychological theory which can be used to support your understanding. Think about when you have analysed qualitative data, you have read the transcript and are familiar with it. Then you identify the patterns, coding the data and construct themes which are informed by theory. This is why you have a development aim or goal for your reflection, or a research question or hypothesis for your study. Without this to focus your approach, it is difficult to analyse and draw conclusions in a meaningful way.
Remember: It is absolutely fine if you are not successful in completing your aim or goal in your experience on this occasion, it may be that you need to have more practice and that success will come at a later stage. Similar to finding a null result, it does not mean that the research has failed, it means that no pattern was observed in the data on this occasion, in this context. This is why it is important to return to your self-evaluation, which is discussed in the next section.
Drawing conclusions
In your discussion of your research report, you would first highlight whether your results answered your research question or hypothesis. Following this, you would discuss the findings in relation to the previous literature. You would then add further plausibility to your interpretation of your results, as well as justify your arguments, by highlighting the strengths and acknowledging the limitations. Finally, you should discuss future implications for research and/or practical applications of this newly gained knowledge.
You can apply this structure of writing to the way that you think about your development following an experience. Your critical interpretation of your experience and the conclusions that you have drawn are your results. You can link this to your original development aim(s) or goal(s) to assess if you achieved this or not. In the first instance, you may offer some initial explanations around the challenge level of your aim(s) or goal(s). Was it too easy or difficult? Remember, that you can learn about your abilities to set appropriate aims and goals for yourself and can adjust accordingly for your next set of experiences.
Once you have clearly answered if you achieved what you set out to, or not, you can discuss this in relation to your strengths and development needs from the self-evaluation at the start of the process. This is like discussing your results in relation to literature reviewed in the introduction of your report. To get the most out of this, you need to be critical and more importantly honest with yourself. Did you utilise your strengths effectively? Have you made progress where you identified development needs? Have you realised that you have new development needs that you were not aware of? Remember, this is all a learning process; it is more likely that you will have made a small contribution to your development, just as research studies usually is one or two building blocks added to the wall of knowledge. This will be the case, even if you did not successfully achieve your aim or goal, you will still have made some progress from engaging in an experience and reflecting upon what you have learned from that.
To ensure that your discussion of your development is comprehensive, it is important to consider the contextual factors which influence your experiences, your success and your progress. Similar to how the context of research (who the participants were and their demographic information, country research conducted in, variables controlled for, etc.) can influence the outcome of the results, the context of your experience can influence your learning experiences. You will have evaluated the context in your reflections, however, link these contexts back to your development when you are re-evaluating yourself. This is similar to discussing the specific strengths and limitations of your research study. This will help you be critical of your development, identifying barriers and how to overcome these, as well as identify enablers and how to utilise these effectively.
All of the above will enable you to identify new development needs and support you with setting new development aims or goals. It may be that you achieved your aim(s) or goal(s) successfully and you are able to set new ones to identify new challenges. It could be that you were unsuccessful this time, maybe because your aim(s) or goal(s) were too complex and need to be broken down into more manageable chunks, or that you simply need more time to work on them. That is fine, you can adjust your aim(s) or goal(s) as you see fit and continue working towards these. Alternatively, it may be that your experience has taught you that you do not wish to pursue that direction any more and that you set completely new aim(s) or goal(s), informing a completely new direction. There is no right answer, other than what is right for you. You are the research study and how you progress your research is up to you. Just make sure that you have a good argument for why you are doing what you are doing.
In order to achieve this, the arguments need to be evidence-based. Similar to in a discussion of a report, you cannot make claims which are unsupported by evidence. Selecting appropriate, high-quality evidence will help you have a more robust approach to your reflection. This is similar to building your argument based on high quality research which is up to date in your reports. Approaching reflection critically will develop your critical evaluation skills as well improve your self-awareness. Be careful to not just add in critique because you think it is the right thing to do, it is important that it is relevant to your reflection and remains meaningful to your development. Avoid the “lacks ecological validity” style arguments which are often seen in research reports, but also meaningless as they are generic comments and usually unsupported by evidence.
Future implications
This is a really important aspect, albeit small, in research papers where you will be linking your conclusions to how actions can be improved in the future, or what research is going to be the next logical step. A well-written future implications section would not just state what needs to be done, but how to achieve this. For example, it may make recommendations about specific theoretical concepts or measures to include in future research, or how to get stake holders onboard with the conclusions to start discussions about changing practice. What is essential is that these recommendations follow on logically from the study, findings and conclusions which precede it; otherwise the recommendations lack value, plausibility and credibility.
“Is this how I should be thinking about writing my Action Plan section?”. Yes exactly. It is important to remember to give this a lot of thought and attention as the action plan is the most essential part of reflection (see my “Fluffy” article). Despite this, from my experience, the action plan tends to be the weakest section in reflective assessments that I have marked. Those who have written a good quality action plan have stated clear goals which plausibly follow on from their reflection. This means that their future goals are based on what they have identified that they have learned. To go beyond this, a clear explanation is provided of what steps need to be taken in order to achieve that goal. The action plan is not just about the outcome you hope to achieve in the future but how you plan to apply your learning to achieve success in this goal. Another marker of quality is building evidence-based arguments as to why those plans will likely be successful. Similar to research when suggesting potential future findings when discussing the literature, evidence from a variety of sources, included academic research, should be used to justify your plan as this will help make a stronger argument as to why your goal is realistic and achievable.
My final thoughts… for now…
Written reflections (from my experience) are often ad-hoc and chosen after experiences have taken place. Whilst it is possible to write a high-quality reflection using Gibbs’ cycle, or an alternative model, is it the most effective way to approach reflective writing? In short, I do not believe it is. As psychologists we systematically and rigorously approach the research we read and conduct and yet we rarely transfer these excellent skills to other areas of our academic practice. I have taken nearly 5 years to work out how the research methods we teach can also support our reflective practice and written assessments. Hopefully this shows that learning does not end, we continue to evaluate our strengths, knowledge and capabilities and work out how to apply these to progress our areas of development. My hope from this article is that you will be able to see how you can approach reflection from a place of confidence; knowing that you have your research methods training to produce systematic, critically evaluative and robust written reflections for your assessments (and own development!). At the very least, I have helped myself understand a new way to teach reflective practice, to my students.
About the author
Dr Iain Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology within NTU Psychology. He specialises in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning within Psychology, with particular interests in employability learning and written reflective assessments. Iain is currently working on a sabbatical, in the 2022-23 academic year, which is evaluating a new model for assessing reflective writing, as well as developing resources to support the teaching, learning and assessment of reflection.
Psychology at Nottingham Trent University 