Jordi Colomer, together with other members of the Dep. of Specific Didactics and the Dep. of Economics of the University of Girona, publish the paper entitled Validating the Narrative Reflection Assessment Rubric (NARRA) for reflective narratives in higher education in the Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education journal. The NARRA was developed by the authors of this publication and others, as recently published in the Teaching and Teacher Education journal.

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education is an established international peer-reviewed journal which publishes papers and reports on all aspects of assessment and evaluation within higher education. Its purpose is to advance understanding of assessment and evaluation practices and processes, particularly the contribution that these make to student learning and to course, staff and institutional development.

This article focuses on the validity of the new NARRA used to assess students’ reflective narratives in higher education. The authors evaluate its formulation and usefulness from an instructional point of view. To those ends, they engage in both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis, using data from 100+ preservice teachers before and after they attend a Reflective Practice Seminar. The authors find that there are statistically significant differences in student scores between the pre-seminar test and the post-seminar test, suggesting both that students learned to reflect in the framework of the seminar and that the rubric is a valid and reliable instrument to measure this learning. They also establish five categories about the usefulness of the rubric: description, intrapersonal inquiry, interpersonal inquiry, argumentation and improvement. They conclude that the NARRA is a useful tool for identifying students’ current level of reflection in higher education.

This collaborative research contribution is conducted within the framework of the Teaching Innovation Network on Reflective Learning of the University of Girona.