In my introductory calculus-based physics courses we use the Student Workbook which accompanies Physics for Scientists and Engineers by Randal Knight. It has exercises to help students deepen their conceptual understanding of the material. Each week students are required to complete the workbook exercises for the material we are studying. They report their work and reflect on the challenges in a short email message to the instructor. The emails follow these guidelines to help students think about their own thinking.

Some of the rationale for the activity is provided by this short exerpt from How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice.

These three examples show the range of responses from sophisticated metacognitive thinking to perfunctory completion of the assignment.

To try to get a systematic view of all of the email responses for one academic quarter we used these guidelines to assess each email. With just a couple of exceptions the quality of student responses remained unchanged through the term.

While conceptual understanding of the physics was a central part of the course reflected in class tutorials and discussion as well as homework and tests, the thinking about thinking aspect of the email assignment stood alone with little reinforcement. If we expect any significant improvement in students' abilities to reflect on their learning we will need to incorporate supporting activities in the lecture portion of the course.