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Here's where the rubber hits the road. This assignment is really the "capstone" of the portfolio process. Whether you came to PLU at 18 or 19 straight out of high school, as a transfer from community college, or as an older, non-traditional student, you are a different person today than you were when you first set foot on campus. You are older, wiser, more mature, and probably see the world differently than you did when you started. The reflection document requires that you do just that--reflect on your experience(s). How are you different? In what ways have your skills been enhanced by your experience here? How is your sense of self different? How have your career goals changed? How has your sense of vocation changed as a consequence of exposure to global issues? Hopefully you have learned a few "facts" (they are important), but facts are just building blocks for broader pursuits of knowledge and understanding. Your increased ability to analyze situations, synthesize ideas and evaluate courses of action are the real outcomes of a university education. Benjamin Bloom* identified six levels of learning, each based on a progressively higher level of abstraction:
In each of your courses you have experienced varying degrees of abstraction. Some course may have required extensive factual recall, while others may have required that you evaluate complex alternative courses of action, no one of which is clearly "correct." You may find it useful to think about these different levels of abstraction as you prepare your reflection. How have you learned to apply knowledge? Analyze situations? Evaluate courses of action or the decisions of others? Where are your strengths? (Some of us are great at factual recall; others struggle to remember even the most mundane bits of information. Some can (apparently effortlessly) break a complex problem into its component parts, while the rest have difficulty even identifying the nature of the issues at hand.) How has your educational experience enhanced your ability to think abstractly?
* Bloom, B.S., editor. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (two vols: The Affective Domain & The Cognitive Domain). New York. David McKay. (1964) |
Copyright © 2008 Gerald M. Myers
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