A Learning Environment to Promote Awareness of the Experiential Learning Processes with Reflective Writing Support

Abstract

Promoting reflective thinking is becoming increasingly important in helping learners develop strategies to apply new information to unpredictable situations during their daily activities. Reflective writing, based on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, could be one method for promoting reflective thinking that allows learners to consider their experiences and transform them into transferable knowledge, which can be applied to new contexts. However, learners cannot sufficiently practice reflective writing; thus, they cannot learn from their experiences. Therefore, our primary goal is to support reflective thinking by providing writing support. This study presents a computerized learning-environment design that helps learners to master experiential learning concepts using reflective writing. The study demonstrates how the learning-support function enhances experiential learning and enables the desired learning process to be captured. This helps mentors to provide suitable support toward understanding experiential learning. We also demonstrate how the learning environment can help learners to master experiential learning. This design, which has the dual role of supporting and observing implicit thinking behavior, can then be applied to a meta-level thinking support framework in other problem domains.