A Guide to Nursing Students' Written Reflection for Students and Educators

The article explores reflective writing from the viewpoint of nursing students and educators. It discusses the advantages, barriers, and nurse educator's role in student reflection. The article emphasizes the importance of reflective writing in promoting safe, caring, quality nursing care. It also introduces semi-structured reflective writing models such as the reflective grid, Bakers Four-Step Model, and the BEGAN method. The intended audience is nursing students and nurse educators. The article is useful for nurses who want to use reflective practice to promote safe, caring, quality nursing care.

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Student Name:
Essay Title:
Word Count: 1011
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The parts of the bibliography
entry
1 Purpose of Article
A short clear statement of the
purpose of this article
The purpose of the article is to offer guidelines to nursing
students’ written reflections for students and educators
2 Summary
An accurate, succinct account
of the ideas, theories, research
findings or arguments used in
the article
The authors seek to explore reflective writing from the
viewpoint of the nursing student and the educator in nursing by
considering various sections such as advantages, the need for
reflective writing in nursing courses, the barriers to the use of
reflective writing, and the nurse educator’s work in student
reflection. Reflective writing helps in the synthesis of the classroom
and clinical knowledge and the development of the skill of critical
thinking, improves self-awareness, develops professional growth
and enhances professional conduct, and builds a relationship. The
use of reflective writing is faced with various barriers. For instance,
the process of reflective writing involves sharing of assignments
from other departments and the feedback ought to be original thus
making the exercise cumbersome and time-consuming.
Additionally, students have generally a negative attitude towards
writing due to anxiety that is associated with writing. The article
also points out that nurse educators have critical roles in student
reflection such as identifying topics of reflection for the students.
The article asserts that semi-structured reflective writing models
have guidelines that vividly show the purpose of the assignment of
the evaluation technique. Examples include the reflective grid,
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Bakers Four-Step Model, and the BEGAN method. 195 words
3 Intended Audience
Provides a justified
identification of the intended
audience
Usefulness of the Article
Clearly explain the potential
usefulness (or not) of the
article to support the essay
topic:
How nurses can use reflective
practice to promote safe,
caring, quality nursing care.
The intended audience of the article are the nursing student and
nurse educator. The title of the article is “a guide to nursing
students’ written reflection for students and educators”, this title
itself clearly points to the intended audience. Additionally, the
research questions are prove of the intended audience.
The article is useful to nurses for it shows how they can use
reflective practice to promote safe, caring, quality nursing care. For
instance, the article discusses the benefits of article writing such as
development of critical thinking skill, creation of self-awareness,
professional growth and promotion of professional behaviours, and
relationship building. Thus the article emphasizes that a thorough
understanding of the advantages of reflective practice to the nursing
students and nurse educators will enable them to rightly use it to
promote safe caring and quality nursing care. The article also
discusses the role of nurse educator in student reflection; an aspect
which is critical in promoting reflective practice among the students
with different attitudes towards reflective writing.
4 Citation
Full citation of the journal
article that you annotated that
you will use on the reference
list page (APA style)
Naber, J., & Markley, L. (2017). A guide to nursing students'
written reflections for students and educators. Nurse education in
practice, 25, 1-4.
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The parts of the bibliography
entry
1 Purpose of Article
A short clear statement of the
purpose of this article
This article aims at demonstrating that additional benefit can
be acquired from engaging two more dimensions of reflection;
reflection-before-action and reflection-beyond-action, and to show
how these can be associated to the well-understood concepts of
reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.
2 Summary
An accurate, succinct account
of the ideas, theories, research
findings or arguments used in
the article
This paper aims at improving on the current two dimensional
(reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action) aspects of reflection
to a four-dimensional process by adding reflection-before-action
and reflection-beyond-action. The author argues that reflection-in-
action is a needful skill in nursing clinical practice, whereas
reflection-on-action is mostly encouraged in nurse education by the
use of reflective models in tasks. In general, nurse education is
based on practice, however, in applying reflective practice, it adopts
some forms of frameworks to direct student learning. The drawback
of this method is that it doesn’t appreciate the fact that most of the
learning comes from one’s own clinical practice experiences. Also,
the author refutes the assertion that the use of reflection-on-action
tasks builds the reflection-in-action skills that are required for
clinical practice due to the lack of published scholarly evidence.
Furthermore, professional practice and better learning can be aided
by reflection-in-action. Hence, the need for a more detailed
approach to reflection. The author posits that learners can learn to
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reflect on the theory associated to practice before action and then
trail on by thinking in action (in the process of the activity), on
action (after the activity) and beyond action (reflecting on the
effects of the experiences on their learning), with regard to the
contributions towards their nursing career. 209 words
3 Intended Audience
Provides a justified
identification of the intended
audience
Usefulness of the Article
Clearly explain the potential
usefulness (or not) of the
article to support the essay
topic:
How nurses can use reflective
practice to promote safe,
caring, quality nursing care.
The intended audience of the article are both the nursing student and
nursing educator. This is justifiably true because the objective of the
article is to show reflection as a four dimensional process by adding
two additional reflections (reflection-before-action and reflection-
beyond-action) to the existing two dimensional reflection
(reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action). Furthermore, the
authors argue that when reflection is viewed as a four dimensional
process, that is when it can provide access to better professional
practice; which is relevant to both nursing students and nurse
educators.
This article is of importance to the nurses for it shows them how
they can utilize reflective practice to promote safe, caring, quality
nursing care. For instance, the authors contend that restricting
nursing practice to two dimensions only doesn’t give access to
improved professional practice but with the incorporation of the two
more dimensions, nurses can process their reflection before-action,
in-action, on-action, and beyond-action as a way of broadening and
deepening their comprehension of professional practice.
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4 Citation
Full citation of the journal
article that you annotated that
you will use on the reference
list page (APA style)
Edwards, S. (2017). Reflecting differently. New dimensions:
reflection-before-action and reflection-beyond-action. International
Practice Development Journal, 7(1).
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Reflections
I have learned about one of the major barriers to reflective writing is the negative
attitude of students towards writing (Naber & Wyatt, 2014). This can be attributed to former
struggles on the negative feedback due to poor performance in assignments with regard to
grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Thus, I intend to improve on excising positive attitude
towards writing in general in order to improve my writing, in general, more so reflective
writing. I have also learnt that reflective writing builds relationships by creating community
through facilitation discussion and enhances associations among learners and with the faculty
(Kerr, 2010). Students are able to deliberate on clinical experiences that they have reflected
on and suggestions on how they can better their skills and practices. I, therefore, plan to
practice much of reflective writing in order to develop and foster relationships among peers
and faculty as a way of improving my professional skill and actions. I have also learnt that it
is not only important to reflect in action (during the activity), and on action (after the activity)
but to also reflection relevant theory before action and beyond action in order to gain access
to advanced professional practice which could otherwise be impossible (Edwards, 2017). 205
words.
I intend to use reflection in my future to develop critical awareness by reflectively
writing about my clinical experiences thus assisting me to ascertain the areas that require
improvement (Wald & Reis, 2010). I will begin by choosing a reflective model and apply it
in systematically reflecting in a given event, and record in a reflective journal. In my
reflectional journal, I will categorise the experiences as superficial, medium, and deep
reflections. Superficial reflections will be more of a descriptive reflection in which I will
largely describe the occurrence of events. It will cover the events and the possible causes of
the events. Under Medium reflection, I will go further to explore thoughts, opinions and
views on what has happened as a process of finding the solution to the problem. The medium
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category of reflection derives meaning from the lessons learned and the possible action for
the future. The deep reflection is a critical reflection which demonstrates that the event has
made changes in the individual’s perspective of self, relationships, society etc. this will
demand that I be cognizant of the impact of the chosen incident on other situations. I will also
incorporate some references to relevant extant literature. 199 words
Reflection-in-practice is the retroactive scrutiny of an event already undertaken so as
to ascertain the knowledge used in actual situations through the examining and interpreting
the information that is remembered (Edwards, 2013). Thus, it encompasses a reconsideration
of the event that has already taken place. Yanow & Tsoukas (2009) argues that it
encompasses the conversion of information into knowledge by the use of a post-mortem that
is cognitively undertaken, which further facilitates the step by step development of decision
making. Bolton (2010) reasons that reflection-in-practice increases an individual’s knowledge
but at the same time also challenges the existing theories and concepts. Reflection-on-
practice involves a manner in which practice can be developed or changed after practice
(Edwards, 2008). In other words, the reflection is on the action, contemplating on what one
has done so as to ascertain how the knowledge of the action may have prevented to the
unexpected outcome. This approach enables the practitioner to redesign the activity while it is
being carried out and is thus associated by an experienced practitioner. The steps of
reflection-on-practice can be grouped into four; the first one is to choose an incident, reflect
on the situation before intervention and afterwards, merge the gap before and after. 203
words
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References
Bolton, G. (2010). Reflective practice: Writing and professional development. Sage
publications.
Edwards, S. (2008). Leadership and management in curriculum design: Bureaucracies,
subservience and subordination. Nurse education today, 28(2), 131-133.
Edwards, S. (2017). Reflecting differently. New dimensions: reflection-before-action and
reflection-beyond-action. International Practice Development Journal, 7(1).
Edwards, S. L. (2013). Learning from practice: the value of story in nurse
education (Doctoral dissertation).
Kerr, L. (2010). More than words: applying the discipline of literary creative writing to the
practice of reflective writing in health care education. Journal of Medical
Humanities, 31(4), 295-301.
Naber, J., & Wyatt, T. H. (2014). The effect of reflective writing interventions on the critical
thinking skills and dispositions of baccalaureate nursing students. Nurse Education
Today, 34(1), 67-72.
Wald, H. S., & Reis, S. P. (2010). Beyond the margins: reflective writing and development of
reflective capacity in medical education. Journal of general internal medicine, 25(7),
746-749.
Yanow, D., & Tsoukas, H. (2009). What is reflection‐in‐action? A phenomenological
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account. Journal of management studies, 46(8), 1339-1364.
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