Analysis of Students’ Reflective Essays on Their First Human Dissection Experience

PURPOSE: Reflection is increasingly being used in higher education, but the criteria to assess the depth of reflection in student essays are difficult to define. This article tested the hypothesis that a good reflective essay contains more terms indicating mental processes. METHODS: The authors selected two essays written by first year medical students at The University of Hong Kong, after their first encounter with cadavers in their dissection class. The two essays were perceived by teachers as having different depths of reflection. The transitivity system in Systemic Functional Linguistics was adopted to compare the two essays in terms of percentage occurrence of different process types (mental, material, relational, verbal, behavioral, existential). RESULTS: The analysis showed that the essay with deeper reflection had a higher percentage occurrence of mental and relational processes and a low percentage occurrence of material processes. The other three processes accounted for only a low percentage of processes in both essays. CONCLUSION: From the transitivity analysis of the two reflective essays, the hypothesis that a good reflective essay contains more terms indicating mental processes is supported. The transitivity system in systemic functional linguistics can thus be used as an objective framework for assessing the depth of reflection in written essays.