Reflective Thinking Skills
Outline
 What is Reflective Thinking?
 Reflective Thinking and Managerial Decision Making
 How to become a Reflective Thinker?
 Perspectives on Reflection
 Three stages of Intellectual development
 MIS 101 Reflective Thinking Dimensions
 Exercises
What is Reflective Thinking?
 “…the process of creating and clarifying the meaning of
experience (past or present) in terms of self (self in relation
to self and self in relation to the world.)”
Boyd & Fales . Reflective Learning: Key to Learning from Experience. Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, 1983
 Reflective thinking is a part of the critical thinking process
referring specifically to the processes of analyzing,
evaluating, and making judgments about what has
happened.
Reflective Thinking and Managerial Decision
Making
• Individuals… “had never before thought about how they
reflected. When asked, they were aware that they did
reflect, but they had never considered it as something they
could control or something they could use as a learning
tool.”
Boyd & Fales, Reflective Learning: Key to Learning from Experience. Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, 1983
• Enhancing decision making requires that we learn from our
successes and failures and catalog mentally for future
retrieval what has occurred and why.
Dr. E. Byron Chew & Dr. C. McInnis-Bowers Reflective Thinking Skills: Developing and
Accessing this Management Tool
How to become a Reflective Thinker?
 Good reflective thinking is a process where an individual:
– determines what information is needed for understanding the issue
at hand
– accesses and gathers the available information
– gathers the opinions of reliable sources in related fields
– synthesizes the information and opinions
– considers the synthesis from all perspectives and frames of
reference
– finally, creates some plausible temporary meaning that may be
reconsidered and modified as one learns more relevant information
and opinions
Cynthia Mazow: Learning, Design, and Technology Stamford University
Perspectives on Reflection
 Metacognition
 Solving Problems in Uncertainty
 The Philosophical Mind
Metacognition
 Questions surrounding an individual's ability to reflect is at the core of
the historical roots of the concept of metacognition (Brown, 1987).
Metacognition as an area of inquiry may be divided into three
components:
– Metacognitive knowledge- the awareness of one's knowledge and
cognitive strategies
– Metacognitive judgements and monitoring
– Control and self-regulation of cognition
 Through reflection, one becomes aware of one's own knowledge or
cognitive strategies; and one cannot monitor or regulate one's own
cognitive strategies, if one is not aware of what those strategies are.
 Researchers interested in the notion of metacognitive knowledge
consider the object of reflection-the mind's "operations"-to be
cognitive strategies for performing specific tasks. In such cases, the
metacognitve individual must have clear, predetermined goals and
standards in order to monitor and regulate her cognitive strategies
effectively.
Solving Problems in Uncertainty
 John Dewey and King and Kitchener-propose that individuals engage
in reflection when they encounter problems with uncertain answerswhen no authority figure has an answer, when they believe no one
answer is correct, and when the solution cannot be derived by formal
logic. The uncertainty or the belief in uncertainty is the essential
requirement in this case for reflective thinking to occur. An individual
must acknowledge that some problems may not be solved by one
absolute truth.
 According to King and Kitchener “ … Reflective thinking requires the
continual evaluation of beliefs, assumptions, and hypotheses against
existing data and against other plausible interpretations of the data.
The resulting judgements are offered as reasonable integrations or
syntheses of opposing points of view”.
 King and Kitchener developed a Model of Reflective Judgement in
which the reflective thinker examines and evaluates the available
relevant information and opinions to construct a plausible solution to a
problem. This plausible solution becomes the individual's belief that is
subject to change as one gathers more information. The object of
reflection in this situation-the "state of one's own mind"-is recognized
as temporary and subject to change.
The Philosophical Mind
 Richard Paul compares reflective thinking to the philosophical mind.
In his view, the philosophical mind:
– Routinely probes the foundations of its own thought, realizes that its
thinking is defined by basic concepts, aims, assumptions, and values
– Gives serious consideration to alternative and competing concepts, aims,
assumptions, and values
– Enters empathetically into thinking fundamentally different from its own,
and does not confuse its thinking with reality
– Gains foundational self-command, and is comfortable when problems
cross disciplines, domains, and frameworks
– Habitually probes the basic principles and concepts that lie behind
standard methods, rules, and procedures
– Recognizes the need to refine and improve the systems, concepts, and
methods it uses and does not simply conform to them
– Deeply values gaining command over its own fundamental modes of
thinking
Three stages of intellectual development
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Dualism. Very young or unsophisticated thinkers tend to see the world in polar terms:
black and white, good and bad, and so on. These students also have what Perry calls a
“cognitive egocentrism”—that is, they find it difficult to entertain points of view other
than the ones they themselves embrace. If they have no strong beliefs on a topic, they tend
to ally themselves absolutely to whatever authority they find appealing. At this stage in
their development, students believe that there is a “right” side, and they want to be on it.
They believe that their arguments are undermined by the consideration of other points of
view.
Relativism. As students progress in their academic careers, they come to understand that
there often is no single right answer to a problem, and that some questions have no
answers. Students who enter the stage of relativism are beginning to contextualize
knowledge and to understand the complexities of any intellectual position. However, the
phase of relativism has some pitfalls—among them that students in this phase sometimes
give themselves over to a kind of skepticism. For the young relativist, if there is no Truth,
then every opinion is as good as another. At its worst, relativism leads students to believe
that opinion is attached to nothing but the person who has it, and that evidence, logic, and
clarity have little to do with an argument’s value.
Reflectivism. If students are properly led through the phase of relativism, they will
eventually come to see that indeed, some opinions are better than others. They will begin
to be interested in what makes one argument better than another. Is it well reasoned? Well
supported? Balanced? Sufficiently complex? When students learn to evaluate the points of
view of others, they will begin to evaluate their own. In the end, they will be able to
commit themselves to a point of view that is objective, well reasoned, sophisticated—one
that, in short, meets all the requirements of an academic argument.
William Perry’s Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme
(1970)
MIS 101 Reflective Thinking Dimensions
The most complete listing of reflective skills is found in Weast (1996)
and were arragned and modified in a way to help us reflect:
 Identify the reasons and the evidence
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Identify the author's conclusion
Identify vague and ambiguous language
Identify value assumptions and value conflicts
Identify descriptive assumptions
Evaluate statistical reasoning
Evaluate sampling and measurements
Identify omitted information
Gathers available information of reliable sources
 Evaluate logical reasoning
– Synthesizes the information and opinions from all perspectives and fremes of
reference
 Makes appropriate judgements
– Articulate one's own values in thoughtful, fair-minded way (objective, well
balanced, and suffient complex)
Exercise #1
 Describe a situation on-the-job when you were
embarrassed, felt awkward, or were otherwise
uncomfortable.
 How do you explain the situation? Your role? The role of
others?
 What key insights did you learn that will assist you in the
future?
Exercise #2 (Based on the Reflections Guide
in Page 219a)
 Explain in your own words why an organization might
choose to change its processes to fit the standard blueprint.
What advantages does it accrue by doing so.
 Explain how competitive pressures among software
vendors will cause the ERP solutions to become
commodities. What does that mean for the software
industry?
 If two businesses use exactly the same processes and
exactly the same software, can they be different in any way
at all? Explain why or why not.
 In theory, such standardization might be possible, but
worldwide there are so many different models, cultures,
people, values, and competitive pressures, can any two
businesses even be exactly the same?
Exercise #3
 Write 3 things you want your family and friends to
remember you by.
 Write your own epitaph.
Famous epitaphs:
– I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.(translated) - (Nikos
Kazantzakis)
– Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
that here, obedient to their law, we lie. —Simonides's epigram at
Thermopylae
 Why did I ask you these 2 questions?