Using Weblogs to Determine the Levels of Student Reflection in Global Education

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how students reflect on the geographical content they are taught in everyday classroom situations. Thinking about geographical content enables students to comprehend the interrelations between facts, to grasp the nature of systems and to take informed actions. It is argued here that the processes of reflection used by students are an essential part of Global Education, as defined by the German curriculum framework. The study reported here aimed to distinguish levels of reflective thinking amongst students and to determine the factors responsible for this, in turn shedding light on how student reflection can be fostered to promote powerful geographical thinking. Personal student weblogs were used to gather data, revealing significant differences in students’ reflective thinking. The results show that reflective thinking differs among students of the same class, among lessons of the same unit, and between different classes. Several factors were found to account for these differences in reflective thinking, such as variation in students’ everyday experiences, their use of key concepts, student gender and the nature of the learning environment they occupied.