I think that offering learners an activity to track back their own reflections from the outset of an independent project/assignment to follow their own lines of thought and activities, their strategies and outcomes, would require them to "learn by thinking back, then thinking forward" to apply their learning to new learning trajectories/goals. The assignment/project might have started as a prescriptive, pre-set goal assigned by an instructor, but as the student follows back their incidental learning paths from the past to the present, the emergent learning that occurred alongside the prescriptive learning becomes clearer, and this lays the transformational learning framework needed for learners to more proactively engage in a different perspective towards learning: creating improved current learning pause-points to better keep track of their learning journeys for future reference.
This was my own perspective as I began to be more retrospective and future-oriented, more aware of the impact of my work on self and others. It informed me better of how to add details, tags, commentaries, links, etc, to embed more context and make it essentially more meaningful for me at some future point in time when needed.