The Guided Essay is one way to make reflective judgment visible. Based on the Reflective Judgment Interview, the guided essay can be used to assess the assumptions that students use when trying to solve ill-structured problems (sometimes called messes). It yields feedback to students on the approaches they take when they deal with matters of real controversy and provides information to their professors on the level of sophistication present as students define and defend their positions.

Less mature students may remain locked in an authoritarian model of learning. Others may be unwilling to admit that some opinions really are better than others and that their own cherished ideas may need to be replaced with something rationally superior. This assessment can make visible the notion that a really good argument, statistical or otherwise, is one that convinces a reasonable skeptic. In short, the assessment reveals the capacity of students consciously to integrate various parts of the curriculum that got them to this point.

The Guided Essay is not limited to topics involving statistics or research design. Because it relies upon a written response rather than an oral interview, it suffers from the usual shortcomings of student essays: Reluctance, resistance, and regurgitation. If one can get past these, however, the exercise reveals much about how students use ---or don't use--- other parts of the curriculum and how they are are hindered by their assumptions.

The accompanying example is designed to foster critical thinking beyond mere number crunching in an upper division physiology course. Its purpose is to acquaint students with the interpretation of statistical results that appear in scientific inquiries of controversial issues and are used to support a conclusion. The statistics themselves can be very elementary. This assessment requires the professor to read one-page essays and, therefore, its use requires an appropriate commitment of time.

----P.K. Wood and C.L. Lynch, 1998. Campus strategies: Using guided essays to assess and encourage reflective thinking. Assessment Update 10(2) (March-April): 14-5.

The Guided Essay

The purpose of this Guided Essay is not to uncover how much you know or whether you think there is a single right answer. Rather, its purpose is acquaint you with the assumptions that you bring with you when you approach a controversial question. Please answer the questions in an integrated essay (don't just answer question #1, #2, #3...) that is no longer than one, printed, single-spaced manuscript page. Focus on the issue and on clear exposition rather than on the rules of composition.

Consider an obstetrical researcher interested in the relationship between maternal nutrition and the appearance of gestational hypertension. The researcher acquires both a nutritional inventory and maternal blood pressures during pregnancy, delivery, and recovery. The correlation coefficient between the two sets of measurements is .6 at a level of statistical significance of .01.

Guided Essay Questions

1. Does this study convince you that gestational hypertension is related to maternal nutrition? On what do you base your opinion and conclusion?
2. Reconsider: How confident are you that your conclusion is correct?
3. Could people reasonably disagree with your conclusion regarding the relationship of gestational hypertension to maternal nutrition?
4. Suppose two people do disagree. Is the relationship of gestational hypertension to maternal nutrition simply a matter of opinion, with neither opinion being any better or any worse than the other? Or is one really right and the other really wrong?
5. Could experts in this discipline reasonably disagree about whether this study shows that gestational hypertension is related to maternal nutrition?
6. Could experts in statistics reasonably disagree about whether this study shows that gestational hypertension is related to maternal nutrition?
7. Do you recommend that a researcher in obstetrics consult an expert in statistics about the results of this study? Why so?
8. Reconsider your own comments, the purpose of this course, and the guided essay itself. To what degree is this exercise appropriate for an upper-level physiology course? Is this guided essay both comprehensive and focused? Does it ignore ideas essential to your understanding whether gestational hypertension is related to maternal nutrition? Does what you have learned about statistical inference and research design give you new insight into this question? What other topics in this course would you likely find more understandable if accompanied by a similar approach?