Are student reflections on professional engagement activities correlated to academic performance?

The University of Sydney has introduced a program of engaging engineering students throughout their degree program in diverse forms of exposure to, and engagement with, professional practice. As part of this program students are required to write detailed reflections on each activity. These reflections provide a rich source of information regarding students' level of conceptual understanding and the extent of consideration of different professional competencies. This article reports on research that uses this data in exploring the relationship between students' academic performance and the nature of their reflections on a broad range of professional engagement activities. A large set of student reflections (N=8,628, totalling approximately 3.5 million words) completed by N=1,633 students was thematically coded against both Blooms taxonomy and the Engineers Australia Stage 1 Competency standards. These results were then compared to students' academic results. Reflections were dominated by verbs associated with level 3 (apply) and level 6 (create) of Blooms taxonomy, reflecting the focus on making within the Engineering discipline. Reflections related to design activities exhibited the highest levels of cognitive complexity, whereas activities emphasising understanding tended to rank the lowest in complexity. Surprisingly, there wasn't a significant correlation between the dominant Bloom level of the students' reflections and the academic performance (or improvement) of the students, nor was their academic performance correlated with a stronger tendency towards undertaking activities that emphasised particular competencies. The results highlight the importance of design during professional engagement activities in encouraging higher levels of reflection.