Using Journaling–Student Reflections on Learning

Dr. Anna Chur-Hansen, Royal Adelaide Hospital, Australia

This thoughtful exercise emphasizes the practice of analysis, inference, and evaluation. It also calls upon students to be fair-minded in their critique, training the critical thinking dispositions of truth-seeking and open-mindedness. Reflective journaling is used with careful guidance to developing the important skill of metacognitive reflection summed up by one of the journaling directions: “Consider why you think so.” This habit of mind is at the heart of competent clinical reasoning at every level of expertise.