Recommending Is Reflecting: A Surprising Benefit of Social Recommender Systems for Teachers

Social recommender systems for teachers are based on evaluative feedback that teachers provide regarding learning resources (LRs) they used. These systems can greatly enhance the efficiency of locating quality digital learning resources by teachers. Previous studies on social recommender systems were based on the view that the act of providing feedback has no direct merit for the recommending teacher. We challenge this viewpoint, hypothesizing that writing a review about an LR would necessitate teachers to revisit and critically evaluate their teaching experiences with it, thus promoting reflective thinking. To investigate this hypothesis, we applied a verbal analysis protocol to measure the level of reflective thinking within 394 reviews of LRs provided by teachers. Our findings reveal that writing feedback on LRs indeed promotes reflective thinking, although the depth and content of the reflection are somewhat limited.