Polish Perspective on the Reflective Judgement Level Amongst Students of the Erasmus Programme

Abstract

Erasmus is the largest programme in history that supports student mobility in Europe. It improves foreign language skills and the soft skills of participants, enabling immersion in diverse cultures. Moreover, it is viewed as a driver for innovation and social inclusion in higher education, contributing to a rise in the self-esteem, independence and openness of participants. These features are the integral ingredients for high levels of reflective judgment, understood as selfreferencing to one’s own knowledge production, understanding the sources of knowledge, the contexts and the relativity of one’s experience. In the empirical study presented in this paper, international Erasmus exchange students were subjected to standardised assessment of their reflective judgement level. Educational, social and familial experiences, connected to the latter were taken into account. The basic theoretical framing is derived from King and Kitchener’s (1994) Reflective Judgment Model, based on 7 cognitive stages, characteristic of 3 different levels of reflectivity: pre-reflective, quasi-reflective and reflective. The results of presented study indicate that international Erasmus exchange students display high levels of reflective judgment and the authors argue that it may be due to several socio-educational factors including an ideal activating learning environment created by the programme.