Exploring Reflective Capacity among First-Year Students on a Computer in Education Course

Abstract

Reflective thinking requires higher order thinking skills as it involves students’ capacity to think, react and decide rationally. Thus, it is important for students to master reflective thinking skills as this will help to improve their learning outcomes. In the Computer in Education course, students are exposed with new skills related to current technologies, and are promoted to apply the technologies for teaching and learning purposes. All these skills are gathered through learning by doing process during the class which requires students to actively apply their reflective thinking. This study was conducted to identify reflective thinking capacity among the overall 123 first year students who took this course. Data were collected through an online questionnaire, composed using the Google Forms. An analysis was conducted using SPSS version 22 to produce descriptive as well as inferential analysis. The results indicated that students showed a high mean in the aspects of reflective thinking—“reflection” and “critical reflection” which indirectly indicated their ability to critically reflect on the processes they did and how to improve the processes. The findings also indicated that students showed an agreement with the fact that what they did previously and the course had challenged some of their firmly held ideas.