The three-fold benefit of reflective writing: Improving program assessment, student learning, and faculty professional development

• Reflection can aid in assessment, student learning, and professional development.
• Assessing reflections revealed effective practices and areas needing improvement.
• Reflection allowed us to understand the processes that guide textual productions.
• Students described their processes more than they engaged in metacognition.
• Faculty required professional development to teach reflection effectively.

This article presents a model of reflective writing used to assess a U.S. general education first-year writing course. We argue that integrating reflection into existing assignments has three potential benefits: enhancing assessment of learning outcomes, fostering student learning, and engaging faculty in professional development. We describe how our research-based assessment process and findings yielded insights into students’ writing processes, promoted metacognition and transfer of learning, and revealed a variety of professional development needs. We conclude with a description of our three-fold model of reflection and suggest how others can adapt our approach.