In-App Reflection Guidance: Lessons Learned Across Four Field Trials at the Workplace

This paper presents a concept for in-app reflection guidance and its evaluation in four work-related field trials. By synthesizing across four field trials, we can show that computer-based reflection guidance can function in the workplace, in the sense of being accepted as technology, being perceived as useful and leading to reflective learning. This is encouraging for all endeavors aiming to transfer existing knowledge on reflection supportive technology from educational settings to the workplace. However, reflective learning in our studies was mostly visible to limited depth in textual entries made in the applications themselves; and proactive reflection guidance technology like prompts were often found to be disruptive. We offer these two issues as highly relevant questions for future research.