The Role of Reflection in the Extended Essay

Alethea Bleyberg explores the use of Reflection within the Extended Essay process and how best it can be used to create more meaningful, in-depth reflection.

As a former EE Coordinator, member of the EE curriculum review team, and EE examiner, instructing students on how to conduct academic research for the Extended Essay (and the Core more generally) has been my passion project for the last decade. With the ever-increasing emphasis on approaches to learning in IB pedagogy, skills development has never been more important. Of these skills, reflection is one that the IB values highly. It is, after all, one of the ten learner profile attributes.

Reflection received a new and substantial emphasis in the current EE guide (first assessment 2018) with the introduction of the Researcher’s Reflection Space (RSS), formal reflection sessions and the Reflections on Planning and Progress form, more commonly known as the RPPF. The EE guide, understandably, makes a number of assumptions about the importance of reflection in the Extended Essay process. As a metacognitive skill, reflection is a complex process requiring a focus on multiple types of strategies, including cognitive, metacognitive and affective/motivation strategies. Moreover, it is assumed that reflective thinking strategies generally result in increased academic achievement. As a result, reflection is an integral component of virtually all IBDP courses whether it be the process portfolio in Visual Arts, the learner portfolio in Literature: A or the TOK journal in Theory of Knowledge. It was, therefore, no surprise that reflection was added as an assessed component in the Extended Essay process in the most recent guide.

The EE guide sums up its assumptions around the importance of reflection succinctly as follows: 

“As a part of the extended essay, students will be expected to show evidence of intellectual growth, critical and personal development, intellectual initiative and creativity. The depth of reflection will demonstrate that the student has constructively engaged with the learning process. Such engagement provides evidence that the student has grown as a learner as a result of his or her experience. More importantly, it demonstrates skills [such as critical thinking, decision-making, research, planning, time management, citing and referencing] have been learned.” EE guide p.41

In my view, placing emphasis on reflection, especially in a process as complex as the Extended Essay, can only be a good thing. But this by no means answers the following questions around how reflection should be structured, guided, evaluated and assessed in the EE.

Some key questions that I believe need to be addressed include:

• How do students respond to formal reflection? Are mandatory reflections an authentic task?
• What is the relationship between the quality of the EE and the quality of the RPPF reflections?
• How can we best support students in writing detailed and purposeful reflections?
• Do reflections really demonstrate how well a student has developed time-management, organisation, research, academic writing and academic integrity skills, or are there other ways in which we could assess progress in these areas?
• Is it fair to assess reflection in the EE process, and if so, what weighting should be given to it?

In my own experience with students, the quality of the reflections often fails to live up to the quality of the Extended Essay. Occasionally this is because students don’t actually complete the reflections when they should in the process, but even when they do, I have found that even some of my best students’ reflections are rather superficial and focused on the less interesting parts of their project. The feedback I have received from my students is that they see reflection as an afterthought to an already daunting process, and something of an IB box-ticking exercise rather than a process designed to support their success.

Is requiring reflection to be embedded in the EE itself a way of ensuring better reflection?

While it certainly would be possible to embed reflection within the EE, the danger of this is that it could interrupt the writer’s flow and sound inauthentic. It is more authentic for researchers to keep journals where they take notes before and during their writing processes.

My own feeling is that the RPPF is largely fit for purpose, but that the 500-word limit discourages students from more meaningful, in-depth reflection. I would like to see the RSS and RPPF merged in some way so that reflection becomes an integral part of the EE process for students, although I acknowledge that for some, the natural inclination is to do the bare minimum. Still, I feel that if students write longer and more detailed reflections, they would be more likely to produce reflections that better articulate the parts of the EE process that were most significant for them.

I am also a strong believer in scaffolding students’ learning experiences and providing explicit guidance on how to write strong reflections along with exemplars is the best way to raise expectations around written reflections. The poor quality of reflections seen by many EE coordinators and examiners suggests there is still a way to go to ensure that most IB Diploma students are confident and articulate reflective communicators. To that end, the materials in the TSM could be improved to support EE supervisors and coordinators in clarifying expectations and standards to students and supporting students in improving the quality of their own reflections. I also think that allowing students to edit their reflections should be considered, given that students’ EE journeys are rarely straightforward, and students who change subjects, topics or supervisors, currently have to allocate much of their word count to explaining these changes rather than actual reflection. 

Most would agree that mandatory reflection is an authentic task as it is required not only in school settings, but increasingly by universities and in workplaces (e.g. goal-setting, performance management, professional coaching, editing written work, design thinking, etc.) The extent to which written reflections actually demonstrate mastery of key skills is more contested. Surely the quality of the essay itself is more important in assessing the extent to which self-management, research, communication and thinking skills have been shown in the process. The experience of many EE coordinators is that the marks awarded in Criteria A-D closely match those awarded for Criterion E, regardless of the quality of the reflections. It would be interesting to see a statistical analysis of the correlation between marks for Criteria A-D compared to Criterion E to see how closely aligned the marking of EEs and RPPFs is. If the correlation is strong, perhaps further investigation is needed into why this is the case. It would perhaps also be useful for the IB to make available some examples of EEs whose RPPF was much stronger than the essay itself, especially where the RPPF was the element that pushed the EE over a grade boundary, to highlight the importance of reflection in the EE process.

As a member of the curriculum review team, I have been pleased to see significant discussion around ways to improve the quality of student reflection in the EE process, and I look forward to the publication of the new guide for first teaching in 2025.

In the meantime, these are some questions to ponder, and which I would love to hear your thoughts on too:

• How might reflection look similar and different in the new interdisciplinary pathway Extended Essay that is being introduced in the 2025 guide?
• Will the new 500-word reflective statement actually enable students greater depth of reflection compared to the ‘three reflection’ RPPF in the current iteration of the guide?
• How will the rewording of Criterion E impact on the scores awarded in this criterion?
• Will the reduction in the weighting of Criterion E negatively impact students’ engagement with reflection in their EE process?