PPI2015 Assignment Specifications

Reflective writing guidance

The purpose of this guide is to provide further information on the Reflective writing Assignment, IP IV, which contributes towards the final marks for the course, Patient and Public Involvement. 

Reflective writing assignment

The Patient and Public Involvement course has presented you with new ideas and new ways of thinking about conducting research. You have been challenged throughout to think about your own values and apply your learning to practice. During the course, you were prompted to reflect on your learning through reflective ‘Your Turn’ activities (see Appendix 1), which should give you the basic material to illustrate your narrative in IP IV.

For this assignment you need to write a narrative reflecting on your personal academic and professional development as the course has progressed in relation to the following themes:

• Your knowledge of and attitude to patient and public involvement in research
• Your perceptions of how the course content relates to your own practice, including barriers to implementing patient and public involvement and how these might be overcome
• How you understand the theory and practice of patient and public involvement in research
• If/how, your thinking about patient and public involvement has changed during the course and what influenced this

Essentially, you are trying to demonstrate how you have monitored and enhanced your learning as a course participant through critical reflections on patient and public involvement in research and your response to it.

The 1500-word narrative should provide a reflective evaluation of your personal academic and professional development. As a general guide, you should aim to write approximately 300 words per theme, but if some themes are more relevant than others to you personally, you may want to use more words for these – but please justify your approach in the introduction to your paper.

You should engage with each of the four themes above, and you should include illustrative extracts from your reflections (as entered in in Pebble+ throughout the course) to support what you say in the narrative. These extracts will sit in the appendix of your assignment, do not contribute to the word count and will not be marked on spelling, grammar etc. You should cross-reference the extracts in the main body of your narrative to make it clear which extracts support which statements you make. You don’t necessarily need to draw on all the ‘Your Turn’ reflections for IP IV, but as a general guide, you should draw on at least 4 of your weekly reflections in your narrative.

You should conclude with an evaluation of your learning against the learning outcomes for the course and the graduate attributes you feel you have reached (or not), and the consequence/s of this.