Fostering Student Introspection through Guided Reflection Forms

Student self-reflection is an important metacognitive skill to developing expert-like habits of mind. This study focuses on student responses to Guided Reflection Forms (GRFs) and individualized instructor feedback to the submissions. Student and instructor entries were hand-coded by an emergent rubric and, separately, analyzed with LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), a computerized text analysis program that extracts affective sentiment. Sentiment analysis supports the development of a stable basis set (rubric) to describe responses that is robust across both introductory and advanced classes. The analysis also reveals the instructor's use of the ``praise sandwich,'' instinctively embedding critiques and suggestions between specific and general encouragements. The study demonstrates the utility of validated, automated, sentiment analysis as a method by which to analyze large corpuses of written text.