Our Evolving Questions

So, I'm backing up for a second, and these are questions I think we may answer through examination of our data:
* What kinds of reflective techniques do experienced teachers use as they engage in formative assessment and response?
* What kinds of reflective moves do students typically use when asked to think about their learning?
* What does reflective growth look like in students over the course of a semester?
* In what ways does positionality emerge in formative assessment and how might we productively respond to positional statements?
* How does affect emerge in formative assessment, both on the part of teachers and of students and what role does the formative assessment tool seem to play in addressing affective responses?
* What are the roles of regular response in the classroom (from teacher to student and student to teacher)? I'm suddenly struck by the letters Frye used to write to his students. I never thought of them as formative assessment, but in small ways they were like the CIQs but less anonymous.

A few irresistibly pragmatic questions arose as I read your list:

--> What classroom practices (rituals/routines?) can foster a more deliberate and unhurried space within which teachers and students can compose more richly reflective responses? (Or is there some real value in the from-the-hip CIQ responses we all dash through from time to time?) (And am I making an accurate assumption that given such a space would result in richer responses?) This is nuts and bolts stuff, but it's been a perennial challenge to our CIQ so I feel compelled to mention it.

But back to the larger question of our larger questions, here's a possible addition:

* In what observable (i.e., assess-able) ways does critical reflection contribute to a student's mastery of academic content within an academic term?

* In what observable (i.e., assess-able) ways does critical reflection contribute to a student's accomplishment of trans- or extra-academic learning objectives (such as civic awareness in a service learning course) within an academic term?

* In what ways is the writing process itself distinctively helpful (or unhelpful) for critical reflection? (I suppose what I'm getting at here is that our use of the CIQ assumes that critical reflection is done through reflective writing. It may be beyond the scope of our current research to incorporate other reflective tools--such as drawing or other visual media--yet our decision to add the portfolio to our research project will inevitably lead to some visual expression of learning. Should we go ahead and acknowledge that somehow in our formulation of research questions?)