Higher education has developed an unusual habit of asking students to complete a learning experience and then immediately produce another assignment explaining what they learned from the experience they just completed. In a similar fashion, students in online courses routinely write several hundred words in response to a discussion prompt and then compose required replies to classmates because participation guidelines demand it. Across thousands of courses, enormous amounts of student writing are generated each week through reflections, discussion posts, peer responses, journals, and related activities. These assignments have become so commonplace that their educational value is often assumed rather than questioned. The more difficult question is whether all of this writing actually contributes to learning or whether higher education has gradually confused documentation of learning with learning itself.
The concern is not that reflection or discussion lacks educational value. Both have substantial theoretical and empirical support. Reflection has deep roots in educational thought, particularly in the work of John Dewey and Donald Schön. Dewey (1933) argued that reflective thought involves deliberately examining beliefs and experiences rather than simply accepting them at face value. Schön (1983) extended this concept into professional practice by distinguishing between reflection-in-action, which occurs while an individual is confronting and adapting to a problem, and reflection-on-action, which occurs after an experience has taken place. This distinction remains influential because it recognizes that reflection is not limited to writing about an experience afterward. Professionals also reflect while they are actively solving problems, testing assumptions, responding to unexpected circumstances, and modifying their behavior. Hébert (2015), in examining the intellectual traditions of Dewey and Schön, similarly notes that reflection has multiple conceptual origins and warns against treating reflective practice as a single, uncomplicated educational technique.
Experiential learning theories further strengthened the role of reflection in higher education. Kolb (1984), for example, proposed that learning develops through an iterative process involving concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Within that model, reflection plays an important role, but it is one component of a larger learning cycle. Experience is followed by examination, conceptualization, and another attempt. The learner does not simply describe an experience indefinitely. Reflection is valuable because it helps inform subsequent action. This distinction matters because educational practice can sometimes separate reflection from the experience it was intended to improve, transforming it from a cognitive process into a recurring written product.
There is good evidence that reflective interventions can improve learning. Guo’s (2022) meta-analysis examined 23 controlled studies involving 2,010 participants and found a statistically significant, medium-sized positive effect of reflection interventions on learning outcomes. Importantly, however, the effectiveness of reflection varied according to factors such as the type of reflective activity, peer interaction, and the duration of the intervention. In other words, the evidence supports thoughtfully designed reflection rather than the proposition that any assignment labeled “reflection” will necessarily improve learning. The finding should encourage educators to design reflection carefully, not simply attach reflective writing to every instructional activity.
This distinction becomes especially important when reflective writing is graded. Ross, Bohlmann, and Marren (2024) conducted a systematic review of 22 studies examining reflective writing as summative assessment in higher education. Their findings showed that reflective writing can support professional development and help students examine their experiences, particularly when students receive frameworks, examples, feedback, and instructional support. At the same time, the researchers identified significant concerns surrounding assessment literacy, the personal nature of reflection, and the power relationship between students and those grading their reflections. These conditions can encourage what the authors describe as performative rather than genuine reflection, raising questions about whether graded reflective writing always measures the process it claims to assess.
The problem is not difficult to imagine. Students quickly learn the expectations associated with reflective assignments. When asked what they learned, they know they are expected to identify learning. When asked what challenged them, they know they should identify a challenge. When asked how an experience changed their thinking, they understand that some form of intellectual growth is expected. When asked what they will do differently in the future, they can produce an appropriate future application. Students are not necessarily being dishonest when they provide these answers. They are responding rationally to an assessment structure in which reflection has been converted into a performance evaluated against predetermined criteria.
This creates an inherent contradiction. Students are often told that reflection is personal and that there is no single correct interpretation of their own experience. They may then receive a rubric specifying the characteristics that their reflection must demonstrate. They must be sufficiently thoughtful, sufficiently specific, sufficiently analytical, sufficiently connected to course concepts, and sufficiently long. The assignment may therefore assess a student’s ability to construct an academically acceptable narrative of reflection as much as it assesses genuine reflection itself. This is particularly important when the reflective activity is summative, because students have an obvious incentive to produce the type of reflection most likely to receive a favorable grade rather than the reflection that most accurately represents their thinking.
A similar tension exists with online discussion boards. Asynchronous discussion has legitimate foundations in social constructivist learning theory, which emphasizes the role of interaction, dialogue, and shared meaning-making in the development of knowledge. Hawkey (2003), for example, examined asynchronous discussion among trainee teachers and considered its potential to support social constructivist learning. Research has continued to identify possible benefits associated with online discussion, including opportunities for interaction, collaboration, critical thinking, and participation among students who may be less likely to contribute in synchronous environments. Effective asynchronous discussion can therefore be a meaningful component of online learning when students genuinely engage with one another’s ideas.
The problem arises when discussion is operationalized primarily through participation requirements. A typical online assignment may require an initial post of several hundred words, followed by two responses of a specified minimum length. Once these numerical requirements become the primary structure of the activity, discussion can easily become a collection of individual essays rather than an actual exchange of ideas. Students post their own responses, locate two classmates whose posts are easy to answer, provide the required responses, and move on. The resulting activity satisfies the measurable requirements of participation while potentially producing very little intellectual interdependence.
Research on asynchronous online discussion supports a more cautious interpretation of its effectiveness. Fehrman and Watson (2021) systematically reviewed 35 peer-reviewed studies of asynchronous online discussions in higher education. They found that these discussions are widely accepted and frequently used, but there remains little consensus regarding best practices. Their review identified important variables including interaction, participation, group size, discussion format, instructional strategies, and alternative approaches. The findings suggest that discussion boards should not be treated as automatically effective simply because they provide a place for students to communicate. The quality of the instructional design matters substantially.
This is perhaps the larger issue surrounding both reflection and discussion. Higher education has a tendency to transform useful learning processes into standardized assignments because standardized assignments are easy to document and assess. Reflection becomes a reflection paper. Discussion becomes a discussion post. Participation becomes a required number of responses. The learning management system records whether the student submitted the activity, how many words were written, when the assignment was posted, and whether the student responded to classmates. These features provide convenient evidence that educational activity occurred, but evidence of activity is not necessarily evidence of meaningful learning.
Consider a student learning data analysis. The student begins with an unfamiliar dataset and attempts to complete an analysis. The code fails, so the student examines the error and tries another approach. The second attempt produces an output that appears unreasonable, causing the student to reconsider the assumptions underlying the analysis. The student searches documentation, compares examples, asks a classmate for advice, uses an artificial intelligence tool to troubleshoot the code, tests another method, and eventually generates a defensible result. During this process, the student has continually evaluated decisions, reconsidered assumptions, tested alternatives, and modified behavior. From Schön’s (1983) perspective, much of this activity can reasonably be understood as reflection-in-action.
At the conclusion of such an experience, the educational system may nevertheless require the student to write an additional 500 words describing what was learned. Such an assignment may occasionally generate valuable additional insight. It may help the student identify a larger pattern or connect the experience to a theoretical concept. However, it is equally reasonable to ask whether another 30 minutes would sometimes be better spent giving the student a new dataset, introducing a more difficult problem, asking the student to improve the analysis, or requiring the student to apply the newly acquired skill in a different context. The important distinction is between writing about experience and developing expertise through repeated experience.
Expertise is generally developed through increasingly sophisticated encounters with problems. Learners attempt tasks, make mistakes, receive feedback, revise their approach, and eventually develop judgment that allows them to recognize patterns more quickly and make better decisions. Reflection can strengthen this process, but reflection should not become a substitute for further experience. When educators routinely attach reflective assignments to experiential learning, there is a risk that students spend increasing amounts of time documenting learning rather than continuing to practice the skills they are attempting to develop.
The same principle applies to discussion. A meaningful discussion should create some form of intellectual dependency among participants. What one student contributes should influence what another student thinks, questions, accepts, rejects, or modifies. Effective asynchronous discussion therefore requires more than posting individual responses in the same digital location. Research examining online interaction has emphasized the importance of cognitive engagement and meaningful interaction rather than simple participation counts (Zhu, 2006). Similarly, work examining knowledge construction in asynchronous forums suggests that effective discussion requires participants to attend to and build upon the contributions of others rather than merely coexist within the same discussion thread.
This raises questions about common word-count and response-count requirements. In authentic intellectual conversation, contribution length varies according to what the conversation requires. A complex argument may require several paragraphs, while a six-word question such as “What evidence supports that conclusion?” may fundamentally change the direction of a discussion. A rigid rubric that awards more credit for a 150-word response than for a concise but intellectually disruptive question risks measuring compliance rather than contribution. If the objective is discussion, then the quality of interaction should matter more than whether every participant produces an identical quantity of text.
There is also an instructional workload issue that deserves consideration. In a class of 30 students, a 500-word reflection produces approximately 15,000 words of student writing. If those same students complete a 400-word discussion post and two 150-word responses, the instructor has generated another 21,000 words of student content. One instructional module can therefore create approximately 36,000 words for potential instructor review. That workload may be justified when the instructor meaningfully engages with the material, provides substantive feedback, identifies patterns across student responses, and incorporates those insights into future instruction. If the volume of required writing makes meaningful engagement impossible, however, instructors should reconsider why the writing was required in the first place.
This does not mean that reflection papers or discussion posts should disappear from higher education. Rather, they should have to justify their presence in the curriculum in the same way as any other instructional activity. Before assigning either, educators might ask a simple question: What will students be able to understand, evaluate, or do after completing this activity that they could not do before it? If reflection helps students identify why a strategy failed and improves their next attempt, the activity has a clear purpose. If discussion requires students to confront competing interpretations, defend decisions, or revise their thinking after encountering another perspective, the activity has a clear purpose. If a reflective assignment helps professionals examine ethical decisions or connect experience with disciplinary knowledge, there is strong reason to retain it.
If, however, the primary justification is that every module requires a reflection or that every online course is expected to include an initial discussion post and two responses, the assignment deserves reconsideration. Alternatives may provide more meaningful opportunities for learning. Students might compare competing solutions, critique an artificial intelligence-generated answer, revise an unsuccessful project, defend a methodological choice, evaluate a peer’s work, solve a second version of the original problem, or apply a concept in an unfamiliar context. These activities can still require reflection and interaction, but reflection and interaction occur in service of performance rather than merely as artifacts documenting participation.
The deeper issue may be that higher education prefers evidence that can be easily recorded. Written reflections can be submitted. Discussion posts can be timestamped. Word counts can be measured. Rubrics can be completed. Participation scores can be entered into a gradebook. Actual learning is more difficult to contain. It occurs while students struggle with unfamiliar problems, recognize errors, revise assumptions, challenge one another, and develop increasingly sophisticated ways of approaching their work. Those experiences are less tidy than another written submission, but they may be considerably more important.
The world does not need another reflection paper simply because reflection appears in a course objective. Nor does it need another discussion board where students manufacture agreement to satisfy participation requirements. The research does not suggest abandoning reflection or discussion. In fact, it demonstrates that both can support meaningful learning when carefully designed (Guo, 2022; Fehrman & Watson, 2021). What deserves criticism is their automatic use, particularly when the assignment itself becomes more important than the learning process it was designed to support.
Reflection and discussion matter because they are fundamental human processes involved in learning, problem solving, and professional development. They should therefore serve educational experience rather than become substitutes for it. Sometimes students should write about what they learned. Sometimes they should discuss it, debate it, or reconsider it. At other times, the most productive educational decision may be to eliminate another 500-word reflection and simply give students another opportunity to apply what they learned. The strongest evidence that students have reflected on an experience may ultimately not be what they write about that experience. It may be what they do differently the next time.
References
Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. D. C. Heath and Company.
Fehrman, S., & Watson, S. L. (2021). A systematic review of asynchronous online discussions in online higher education. American Journal of Distance Education, 35(3), 200–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2020.1858705
Guo, L. (2022). How should reflection be supported in higher education? A meta-analysis of reflection interventions. Reflective Practice, 23(1), 118–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2021.1995856
Hawkey, K. (2003). Social constructivism and asynchronous text-based discussion: A case study with trainee teachers. Education and Information Technologies, 8(2), 165–177. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024558414766
Hébert, C. (2015). Knowing and/or experiencing: A critical examination of the reflective models of John Dewey and Donald Schön. Reflective Practice, 16(3), 361–371. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2015.1023281
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall.
Ross, M., Bohlmann, J., & Marren, A. (2024). Reflective writing as summative assessment in higher education: A systematic review. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 12(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.56433/jpaap.v12i1.577
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Zhu, E. (2006). Interaction and cognitive engagement: An analysis of four asynchronous online discussions. Instructional Science, 34, 451–480. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-006-0004-0