To reflect involves a combination of critical thinking and discovery. 

This involves asking and answering critical questions about what you read and experience. Rather than discussing purely what happened and your emotional experiences it is important to frame this within an academic context. 

This involves reading widely around themes discussed in your earlier sections to incorporate literature together and producing evidenced suggestions for those thoughts and feelings that could benefit your field of study or your own future reflective process. 

In order to write in an academic manner it is important to be objective, discuss theories and concepts, to compare and contrast theories to build a robust, balanced argument.

If you are aware that you are going to be completing a reflective assignment then it may be useful to try out reflective thinking on an aspect of your daily life such as how you could improve or develop when undertaking a particular task at university, while volunteering or at work and keeping a record of this. 

If you are aware that you will be reflecting on a particular task in advance it may be useful to record your thoughts and actions as they occur and how you feel the task went and why. This may form the beginning of your reflection. 

By being truly reflective you, as the student, could learn more about your area of expertise and understand what you need to work on in order to improve. 

No matter what subject you study by reflecting you can create relevant, realistic goals that can be revisited in the future and support you in development throughout university and into your career. 

You may wish to look at models of reflection page of this Library Guide to gain a deeper understanding of the way reflection can be structured.