Reflective behaviors under a web-based portfolio assessment environment for high school students in a computer course

This research attempted to categorize reflection in a Web-based portfolio assessment using the Chinese Word Segmenting System (CWSS). Another aim of this research was to explore reflective performance in which individual differences were further examined. Participants were 45 eight-grade students from a junior high school taking a computer course. The study results indicated that the words used most often in reflective journals fell into cognition and evaluation categories in comparison to emotion and memory. Based on lexical attributes, reflection was thus classified into cognition, evaluation and mix. Cognition was the most common type, and evaluation, the least; emotion and memory types failed to emerge. Although reflective journals tended to be short, the average scores on reflection were acceptably high, which implied it was the quality rather than the length of a reflective journal that students were primarily concerned about. In addition, significant group differences were detected in terms of word counts and reflection scores. The reviews of peer reflections were seldom fulfilled, and covered merely one-third of the peer work; there were significant group differences related to the number of reviews. The duration of peer reflection reviews was usually short, and again, significant differences were found across various duration groups. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.