Component: Reflection Statement (1 Viewer)

[jhakka]

Good evening to everyone who happens to be really, really, ridiculously good looking,

You've reached the end of the road, the journey is almost over, and every other bad cliche that comes to mind. I'm pretty sure the final submission date is coming up soon, and at the very least I know that it hasn't passed, because there would be many a student wanting everyone else to read their works. And so, before it's too late, I will attempt to provide you guys with a rough, semi-coherent and even slightly correct summary/guide/crash course to the Reflection Statement. I am least comfortable with this guide, mainly because you don't actually get any feedback from the markers, so it is most important for you to remember that, without a doubt, your teacher knows better than I do on this one.

I won't say that this piece is particularly pleasant or easy to write, and everyone's style will differ. To be honest, I struggled like hell to write mine, and it wasn't a nice experience. The Major Work itself was so much more fun.


What is this...? A CENTRE FOR ANTS?! (About this component):
I would assume that when you get to this point that you have completed your Major Works and just need to write this nasty little thing before signing your life away and submitting your final product. As this is the case, I wish you all the best because I found this piece extremely difficult to get a handle on at the beginning, and even then it took at least two rewrites to get something even slightly respectable.

Anyways, this component is your final reflection (this goes without saying, considering it has the word in the name) about the development of your Major Work, your processes, research and so on. I saw it as a justification of the main aspects of my work, my reasoning for any huge choices I made and and a bit of an explanation about my research, and how all this came together to address the much talked about five dot points found on page 131 of the English Syllabus.

So what's all the big fuss? The fact that you only have 1500 words to do it in, and that it's weighted at (so rumour has it, don't quote me on this) about 15 to 20% (out of 50%) of your external mark. So it's almost as important as your Major Work, and will probably be a major factor in getting the marker to look favourably upon you.


They'll be looking for us at Maury's right? But they won't be looking for... not us. (What to do):
Sometimes this component seems like fun, and other times it doesn't. It's kind of like a combination of your assessments and journal, but not really like that, only because it's meant to accompany and compliment your work, rather than be seen as a completely separate piece that coldly explains specific details. This one is slightly more personal, allowing you to focus on the most important parts of your work and your process, while focussing on the five syllabus points that are as follows (and can also be found on page 131 of the English Stage 6 Syllabus).

• summarises the intent of the work and the relationship it has with the extensive independent investigation
• must include an outline of the intended audience for the Major Work and the purpose for which it was composed
• supports the Major Work explaining the relationships of concept, structure, technical and language features and conventions
• should explain the development of concepts during the process of composition making the links clear between independent investigation and the development of the finished product
• should indicate how the student realised the concepts in the final product.

I won't go into the ins and outs of each point, only because that would be my interpretation and would most likely be incorrect. Most of the stuff seems quite straightforward to me anyway, and probably would be to most of you guys. If anything seems a bit iffy, I would reccomend asking your teacher or going on your gut instinct. If you're pretty sure that one of the points refers to a specific part of your process, you're probably correct.

Anyways, rather than going into how to address each point (a bad idea, I think, because each work and medium is completely different, and different approaches will apply), I will try to give you a bit of help in how to prepare your information in case you have trouble writing this thing from scratch like I did.

What I found to be most effective in developing my Reflection Statement was using each of these criteria points and making them into a subheading, and then attempting to get 200 or 300 words written for each in what could be paragraphs in five completely different essays. I then lobbed a nice introduction and conclusion (with an appropriate amount of sucking up, talking about valuable insights gained from this course, and so on) before and after these sections, and tried to link them all together neatly.

The hardest part of writing the Reflection Statement was making everything fit and flow. If you don't want to use what you wrote word for word, I would print it off and then try and write it from a blank document, using the information you have created for yourself. However you go about writing your Reflection Statement, make sure it flows.

If you don't want to dedicate it to only talking about the five dot points, I don't see that it is a problem. As long as what you do talk about compliments your Major Work and supports, in some way (small or large, direct or indirect), the criteria points, I'm sure that all will be good.And another thing that you have to do, although I think it's silly and have no idea why it's required/encouraged (it's not in the syllabus under the Reflection Statement anyway!) is try and link your Major Work to your studies in English Advanced and English Extension 1. I truly think this is stupid, as each course is separate to the others, with Extension 2 being particularly separated, however apparently it's what the markers want. I don't think that the link has to be massive, and certainly shouldn't have to link to particular texts you examined. An example (as poor as it may be) would be mentioning how understanding of how genre works and how conventions are applied or otherwise, has allowed you to apply similar strategies in your short story in order to get the best effect. Not the best example, but an example nonetheless.

Without going into any great (and possibly incorrect) detail, the two things I must stress to you guys are that you make sure you address the criteria points, and make sure it flows. There is nothing worse than a (boring) Reflection Statement that looks as though it is actually five essays put together, with no idea of structure and logic to it. But you're all clever enough to know how to write a logical, well structured response, so no worries, right?


There's more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. (Layout and format):
Format is a bit of a tricky issue, if only because there is nothing specified in the syllabus. But what I found worked was to do it in essay format and work around to talking about each of the dot points. 1500 words is a lot to work with, although depending on how much you actually have to say (without making it up), it might not sound like enough.

The reason I reccomend that you work in an essay format is because it allows for a set structure, allowing you to address all of your key points in a logical manner that will allow the marker to identify what fulfills what criteria. That's not to say that you have to address the dot points in order, but at least they'll be able to work out what matches up with what.

I don't know how much that will help you, but if you're still not sure about format, I would look into the standards packages if they're available for English Extension 2, and definitely have a glance at how Reflection Statements in the Showcase are set out. They might be boring, but at least they'll give you some idea of what the markers may like.

And I think that's it. My apologies for not being more detailed, but it's been two years since I had to do this, and I am still kinda lost when it comes to the Reflection Statement. This may be due to the fact that the syllabus is not very specific, or maybe because of a lack of personal feedback. Either way, I hope that what I have been able to come up with has been helpful to you.

I must say, though, that because this is a massive part of your mark I strongly reccomend that you run anything based on my advice by your teacher BEFORE YOU SUBMIT IT. Your teacher will always know better than I do.

It's over-ish guys! Well done!

Good luck, and remember that even the best of us can die in a freak gasoline fight accident.
Justin


Note: You can find more info and opinions on the Reflection Statement here: http://community.boredofstudies.org...2/51541/documenting-reflection-statement.html



Just a bit of a disclaimer:
The things that Lynn and I post will not be the same. One of us may miss out on something that the other will mention. Sometimes we will have conflicting comments. The most important thing to remember is that what we are writing is a general guide, and that we are not more knowledgeable than your teachers. If there are issues, please take it up with them. We are not responsible for your work, and if you choose to take our advice, I strongly urge you to run it by your teacher first.

 

[Emph]

remember that even the best of us can die in a freak gasoline fight accident.

Not until I have handed it in and come first in the state (I wish) ! ! ! ! !

 

[kami]

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, it is my pleasure to introduce you all to le Reflectione Statement!

Now first things first, you may have met the mods – they're the nice ones. I'm Evan...and I'm not nice. I also am going to shamelessly copy Justin's habit of using quotes for headings.[ha!]

PS. Justin/Lynn: I wasn't sure what you were up to with this, so I just went ahead and posted – feel free to delete it if this is throws your plans out of whack.

PPS. Readers: No person is ever absolutely right in every aspect of these matters, especially not myself and so it is in this context that you should read this post.

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club (The ground rules)

The Reflection Statement(RS) is the accompanying documentation that you write once everything else is pretty much sorted. Ideally you should give yourself more than a fortnight to write this, and several drafts as the RS is 'serious business!!111one”. It can literally make or break your final result since it is worth approximately 20 of your 50 marks, so you definitely want to make it sparkle and shine.

The RS is also where you justify the why, what and how of your Major Work (you know that big scary chunk of writing you absolutely love to death?) so that means you can use a lot of the gunk from your previous assessments and your journal (which you were filling up non?).

Amelie has one friend, Blubber. Alas the home environment has made Blubber suicidal. (On what do we reflect?)

Ok, you may or may not be buzzing around going: “Oh noes! What do we need to do?!” So the first thing you do is look at the syllabus dotpoints, which Justin has provided above for you.

The Reflection Statement is composed at the end of the composition process and is a reflection upon the process and the completed product. The statement must contain a minimum of 1,000 words and no more than 1500 words.
The Reflection Statement:

• summarises the intent of the work and relationship it has with the extensive
  independent investigation.
• must include an outline of the intended audience for the Major Work and the
  purpose for which it was composed.
• supports the Major Work explaining the relationships of concept, structure,
  technical and language features and conventions.
• should explain the development of concepts during the process of composition
  making the links clear between independent investigation and the development
  of the finished product.
• should indicate how the student realised the concepts in the final product.

So now its translation time – what do each of these points mean?

The Reflection Statement summarises the intent of the work and relationship it has with the extensive independent investigation.

This asks you to explain your intentions – the messages and ideas you have hoped to articulate throughout your MW. It also asks you to describe and explain how your wider reading has contributed to and supported your ability to realise these intentions. In my honest opinion, this is not that different to what you did in your proposal so this might be a good point to get out your proposal and see what you did right/what you did wrong for the relevant part of the proposal.

The Reflection Statement must include an outline of the intended audience for the Major Work and the purpose for which it was composed.

This is a fairly simple concept – explain the type of people that are meant to read the work. Not all that hard to understand is it? Which is part of the problem, often it is easy to consider this as almost unimportant due to its simplicity however it still requires some depth. Not only should you identify who you're writing for, but why you believe your work is relevant to these people. Some areas people often use for this is the language of their work, their topic or the medium itself.

My teacher once told me that a good way of looking at this is to pretend you are a composer pitching to a publisher/distributor of some sort and identifying your target audience and justifying why it'll do well with that targeted audience. So if you're struggling, this might be a good tack to take.

The Reflection Statement supports the Major Work explaining the relationships of concept, structure, technical and language features and conventions.

In essence, this asks you to justify the way you pulled your idea off – if for example you needed a certain setting to get the message across or further your idea, a certain language style, quotations, techniques based on perspective and so on.

A tack you could take if you're stuck is to critically analyse the construction of your piece the way you would analyse someone else's work - this effectively allows you to pick out what actually does have the effect that you want. The only problem with this is that you won't always be capable of the neccesary distance, but oh well.

The Reflection Statement should explain the development of concepts during the process of composition making the links clear between independent investigation and the development of the finished product.

Basically, explain/describe how your concept progressed from A to B and explain/describe how your wider reading/research impacted on this progression. So try to think of the points where you modified your concept, even if only slightly, and discuss how your research impacted upon that decision. If you have been properly keeping a journal this should be an extraordinarily simple thing to do – you could have a look through and process anything relevant (and there should be heaps of relevant things in there). Another good place to look would be your proposal considering it describes what your original pitch was, it could be helpful to some of you.

The Reflection Statement should indicate how the student realised the concepts in the final product.

This means exactly what it says – how did you realise the concept/idea in its final form. It shouldn't be all that difficult to do as it related fairly closely to the previous point except it must be noted that, unlike the previous one, this dotpoint is not confined to relating it to wider reading/research.

Please sir, can I have some more? (More whats)

There is also an invisible 'sixth dotpoint' if you will which you must do:
The student is to show that the knowledge, understanding and skills developed in the English (Advanced) and (Extension) courses has been extended and refined in the Major Work.

Now that sounds nasty, heck it even looks nasty - but its not. You basically have to acknowledge how your work has extended ideas you've been exposed to in Advanced and Extension 1 in both preliminary and HSC years. Given that you've probably been exposed to 8 different modules of English you have a wide range of topics that you could discuss but you probably only need focus on one area and make those links. Hopefully though, the links you make will be more substantial than 'Ext 1 taught me how much I love writing' (and while that sounds like a given, people have used that as a link:/). And thats probably it for that.


You can't have this and that without the other! (General stuff)
Just some points to remember:

• As you can see from the above outlines, many of the dotpoints have quite significant overlap and so it will be quite hard to talk about one and not the other. This is why I beg of you, please make your Reflection Statement an integrated essay rather than five consecutive responses to the dotpoints. Otherwise you'll just end up repeating yourself and wasting words better spent elsewhere.
• Be as concise as you can possibly be - fit as much as you can into as few words as possible because believe me you will need to if you want to fit everything in. You can also imagine that waffle would not look good.
• Clarity is also incredibly important - you do not want your RS to be ambiguous.
• No eating of any thesaurus may take place while writing your RS! It takes away from your writing if you use words in the wrong manner, an even worse possibly is that the marker will accept the meaning but that it won't be the meaning you intended. So please avoid overuse of the thesaurus.
• Strive to make the most of your RS because its your chance to influence how the marker percieves your Major Work - so try not to just make a bare bones RS.
• If you're lost on what direction to take your RS then a good exercise (I did this last year) is to download a heap of them and go over them with dotpoints in hand and try to pick out where you think those RSes meet the dotpoint. Its a great way of identifying, on your own, what you think each dotpoint means specifically.

So long, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

Good luck class of 06! (not that you need it)

 

[jhakka]

/me highly reccomends giving Evan's post a read. While I covered the how, he definitely covered the what.

 

[luscious-llama]

Guys, this is absolutely excellent. I thank you and ninja salute you forever !


~ Lanelle

 

[Nick_R]

...... have my babies!

 

[feefa]

hey there, I am just seeking help with the reflection statement word limit, because I cannot find anywhere whether quotes from resources and also the major work are included in my word limit, or they are excluded as for most other subjects? If they are included I am screwed!! Does anyone know at all???? Thanks a bunch - my reflection statement needs to be brilliant! xx

 

[luscious-llama]

hey there, I am just seeking help with the reflection statement word limit, because I cannot find anywhere whether quotes from resources and also the major work are included in my word limit, or they are excluded as for most other subjects? If they are included I am screwed!! Does anyone know at all???? Thanks a bunch - my reflection statement needs to be brilliant! xx

Min 1000 words
Max 1500 words

 

[cadylayne]

Does anyone know if you have to write how many words your reflection statement is at the bottom?

 

[jhakka]

No, you don't need to do that.

 

[Bridgey91]

nawww you guys are awesome. thanks so much for posting this:wave:

 

[Arsenic]

The link http://community.boredofstudies.org/...statement.html is invalid.

Other than that, this is, as always, a brilliant guide to our assessments and how we are to address our various woes.

You have my gratitude.

 

[taylorg]

Thankyou, this helped alot

 

[Mz Klutz]

You guys are awesomely awesome!!! Thanks so much!
You have my gratitude