Reflection encourages students to think more deeply about goals, accomplishments, and processes (Belmont, Butterfield, and Ferretti 1982; Dively and Nelms 2007; Sommers 2011).
There is “a significant correlation between amount of reflective conversation and the quality of writing plans: students used reflection in metacognitively defensible ways to identify problems, to search for and evaluate alternative plans, and to elaborate and justify ideas” (Sitko 105).
Focused, sustained reflection and metacognition encourage students to reuse and adapt writing knowledge across writing and learning contexts (Alexander and Murphy 1999; Ford 2004; Haskell 2001; Salomon and Perkins 1972; Sitko 1998; Wardle 2007).