The reflective physio student

About this assignment

Reflection has been shown to be a significant component of the learning process (1), particularly in improving clinical reasoning skills (2) and enhancing the in-depth understanding of a subject. Furthermore, the relationship between ethical reasoning and clinical reasoning in physiotherapy has also been established (3).  Reflection will play a significant role in this module (i.e. Professional Ethics in Physiotherapy), as many of the ideas we will discuss have no clear right or wrong answer, and instead rely on your ability to see the many complex factors of a problem and to adopt a reasoning strategy to work through it.

The use of blogging (4) is being evaluated as a potentially effective means of improving reflective skills (5,6,7), through providing an informal, personal presentation of a topic and allowing others to contribute to the conversation through commenting and by providing feedback to the original idea. This allows for a rich, diverse stream of ideas and thoughts that serve to provide further inputs in the reflective process.

This assignment is an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of blogging as a reflective tool for physiotherapy undergraduate students at the University of the Western Cape.

References

1. Learners reflection in technological learning environments
2. Using focused reflection and articulation to promote clinical reasoning
3. Ethical reasoning as a clinical reasoning strategy in physiotherapy
4. Blogging article on Wikipedia
5. Blogging for reflective practice (presentation on Slideshare)
6. Blogging and reflection in ePortfolios
7. Class blogging reflection - Student blogs