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.