Investigating the Link Between Students' Written and Survey-Based Reflections in an Engineering Class.

This study explores the relationship between students' written and survey-based reflections in a first-year engineering class. We collected student reflections using the CourseMIRROR application from 395 students in an engineering class at a midwestern university. After each class during a semester, students were asked to generate a written reflection (in an open-ended format) and their perceived rating (in a Likert-style format) on the lecture's confusing or interesting aspects. We used Spearman correlation statistics to evaluate the relationship between the students' written reflection meta-data (i.e., specificity score and text length) and their perceived lecture rating as confusing or interesting. The results showed that the students tended to rate a lecture as very confusing when they wrote reflections highly relevant to prompts and lecture contents (i.e., reflection quality). Also, we found that the students rating a lecture as very confusing often write a relatively short reflection on the confusing question.