Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students’ development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, Reflection ; White). One assumption about the value of reflection has been that skill in reflective writing also has a positive connection with lower-order writing skills, such as sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. However, evidence to confirm this assumption has been limited to small qualitative studies or deferred to future longitudinal research (Downs and Wardle). In the mixed methods assessment study presented here, we first investigated this assumption empirically by measuring the relationship between evaluative skills embedded in the genre of reflective writing and lower-order writing skills that follow sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. We found a high-positive correlation between reflection and writing assessment scores. We then used qualitative methods to describe key features of higher- and lower-scored reflective essays.

Using concepts and methods from technical and professional communication and linguistics, the authors conducted an observational study of the voice of community members (CMs) in the deliberation of a behavioral institutional review board (IRB). In the discourse of deliberation, they found that CMs had an effective voice in constructing the compliance of individual research protocols under IRB review. But they also found that CMs had an ineffective voice in representing their African-American community, particularly in their efforts to advocate for more consideration of minority research sites and subjects and a fuller consideration of minority community attitudes.