Student engagement has attracted much research attention in higher education because of various potential benefits associated with improved engagement. Despite extensive research on student ...engagement in higher education, little has been written about graduate students’ engagement with supervisory feedback. This paper reports on a study on student engagement with supervisory feedback on master’s theses conducted in the context of Nepalese higher education. The study employed an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design that drew on interviews and a questionnaire-based survey involving supervisors and students from four disciplines at a comprehensive university in Nepal. Analyses of the qualitative and quantitative data revealed significant differences between supervisors’ and students’ perceptions of all types (i.e., affective, cognitive, and behavioral) of student engagement. Significant disciplinary variations were also observed in supervisors’ and students’ perceptions of negative affect, cognitive engagement, and behavioral engagement. Furthermore, disciplinary background and feedback role interacted to shape perceptions of student engagement. These findings have implications for improving student engagement with supervisory feedback.
•102 master’s supervisors and 462 master’s students participated in this study.•We examined their perceptions of student engagement with supervisory feedback.•Students rated their feedback engagement markedly higher than supervisors did.•There were also significant variations in perceptions of engagement across disciplines.•Disciplinary background and feedback role jointly shaped the participants’ perceptions.
We examined the reliability of grading master's theses at a New Zealand university, where a variant of the academic journal review system is employed. The overall correlation between the grades ...recommended by internal and external markers of master's theses in psychology and applied psychology at this university was 0.39, which is similar to that produced between reviewers of submissions to academic journals. We conclude that thesis grading is about as reliable as the determination of the merit of journal submissions, which is usually regarded as rather poor. Applying a more objective rubric to thesis marking might raise the reliability, but such a change might also lower the creative and unique nature of theses, and hence reduce the contribution that an individual thesis can make to its particular discipline.
Current trends in educational sciences can best be evaluated by assessing the master and doctoral theses defended at the universities. The goal of the present paper was to do a qualitative content ...analysis of the titles of master theses defended at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Total of 393 master theses defended in the period from 2012 to 2021 were the subject of this analysis. Of these, 287 were defended at the department for teacher education and 106 at the department for preschool education. As expected, most of the studies dealt with early elementary school students and preschool children. Many studies contained the term “development” in its title, and it was referring to all domains from speech to socio- emotional and motor development. Several studies examined parental and teachers’ attitudes towards various topics. In relation to the subject, most studies dealt with science education, followed by physical education and language. A number of studies had special education as the main topic, covering issues of teacher competencies, creativity, support to students with developmental disabilities, to the quality of life. Students have studied various relevant topics. In the future, we expect to see an increase in studies covering digital competencies of teachers and evaluation of online education.
This paper provides insights into thesis supervisors' perceptions of the supervisory relationship and process in English-medium international master's degree programmes (IMDPs). It contributes to the ...field of supervisory pedagogy in a master's level education by examining how supervisors perceive their supervisory practices and what they consider to be the most important features for successful supervision. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with thesis supervisors employed in five different Finnish universities. Qualitative content analysis was conducted. The results revealed that most of the interviewees perceive supervision as an asymmetric relationship in the context of a teaching model similar to Dysthe's (
2002
). Trust, topic selection, supervisors' support and the initial stage of supervision were regarded as the most important features during supervision. The article concludes with the recommendation that supervisors should have more opportunities to reflect on their supervisory practices.
•A theory or perspective help students unravel discoveries.•Theories and perspectives are consolidations to explain or understand a phenomenon.•In diversified research fields multiple theories and ...perspectives is a strength.•Theorizing requires a basic familiarity with different theories and perspectives.
The present paper is a reply to Brunsson (2021b), who wrote a commentary on the edited volume Theories and Perspectives in Business Administration (Eriksson-Zetterquist, Hansson & Nilsson, 2020). Although we agree with Brunsson on several points, we nevertheless argue that students need to learn about different theories and perspectives. First, the use of theories and perspectives as analytical tools will help students to describe and analyze a certain phenomenon. Second, to be able to theorize students need to acquire fundamental knowledge of the background and the specificities of the theory or perspective in use. Third, an awareness of the diversity of theories and perspectives that exists within the business administration discipline is a prerequisite to being able to contribute to the creation of new knowledge. Finally, we do not agree with Brunsson that the multitude of theories and perspectives in the business administration discipline is a sign of “an inferiority complex”. It is the outcome of the vitality and viability of the discipline.
Using a model of inputs-environment-process-outcomes, our focus is the students' point of view on writing the master's thesis in accounting. We analyze the factors that influence the complexity of a ...thesis and the satisfaction of students with it. We used the answers received on two matched questionnaires distributed during the second semester of the academic year 2021-2022. The results of the path analysis show that planning and involvement in research and university support can increase the effectiveness of students' time management and improve satisfaction with the research outcome. Resource use increases the thesis complexity, too. The paper comprises a couple of implications: first, the quality of the thesis depends to a great extent on the initial planning phase, indicating that university support is crucial during preliminary work; second, university management must ensure the existence of necessary resources, which are a complex mix of supervision, collaboration, guidelines, and scientific sources.
Knowledge construction at graduate level discursively engages writers in building the connection between disciplinary literature and their authority of individual creation. Existing research often ...sees this construction as social and dialogic and has widely examined its rhetorical and interactional features within its disciplinary local contexts. However, little attention seems to be drawn to the interplay between the expected presentation of knowledge and students' actual knowledge-making. Through detailed discourse and intertextual analyses, this study explores supervisory orientations offered through written feedback and their impact on two L2 students' restructuring of knowledge in their master's theses. Findings reveal these students' incorporation of justifiable, interpretive and intertextually pertinent knowledge as concrete responses to these orientations. The ways they organized their conceptual and intertextual resources were shaped by explicit supervisory scaffold and how they wished to present a refined self (critical, self-reflexive, credible, socially-grounded) in writing.
•Master’s students were unsatisfied with the supervisory feedback that they received.•They faced challenges related to themselves, their supervisors, and material resources.•They reported ...emotional/cognitive/behavioural engagement with supervisory feedback.•Their feedback perceptions were related to their disciplinary background.•Perceptions of various aspects of feedback were related to self-reported engagement.
Students’ perceptions of supervisory feedback can have a profound impact on their engagement with and agency in learning. Understanding students’ perceptions is vital to tailoring feedback to their needs. However, little is known about student perceptions of supervisory feedback on master’s theses. To address this lacuna, the present study collected feedback perceptions with a written questionnaire from 434 students in four disciplines (English Education, English Studies, Physics, and Engineering) at a Nepalese university. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that the students as a group did not receive sufficient supervisory support and found their supervisors’ feedback practices unsatisfactory. Despite the inadequate support, they reported emotional, cognitive, and behavioural engagement with the supervisory feedback that they received, and their perceptions of supervisory feedback significantly predicted their self-reported engagement. Furthermore, perceptions of supervisory feedback and self-reported engagement varied significantly across the disciplines. Implications are derived from these findings for improving supervisory feedback practices.
The viva is a crucial component of the master's thesis examination process. It offers students opportunities to defend their thesis and engage in scholarly dialogue with disciplinary experts. As the ...viva involves participants with unequal and hierarchical power relations, the possibility of a scholarly dialogue in the viva is primarily shaped by the positioning of the examiners in relation to the students. Although master's students writing a thesis outnumber those doing a PhD, the research on master's thesis viva is in the embryonic stage. This study set out to extend this research by examining ten master's thesis vivas at a comprehensive university in Nepal. The analysis of audio-recorded feedback sessions revealed that the vivas were primarily examiners' monologic and directive talk. There was little negotiation of power because the students contributed minimally to the dialogue. The examiners acted as custodians and gatekeepers of the discipline to ensure the reproduction of academic norms and conventions. The implications of the study for enhancing the effectiveness of the viva are provided.
This article investigates writer-reader interaction in L2 (Czech) learner academic discourse with a specific focus on reader engagement in English-medium Master’s theses in the humanities. The study ...draws on Hyland and Jiang’s (2016) model of engagement. It aims to reveal how Czech graduates use features of engagement (such as reader reference, appeals to shared knowledge, directives and questions) to establish solidarity with readers by acknowledging their presence and negotiating potential alternative views. The contrastive corpus-based analysis compares a corpus of Czech English-medium Master’s theses with two reference L1 corpora representing learner and published academic discourse to explore the impact of linguacultural background, expertise and discipline on the frequency of use and functions of engagement markers. The findings suggest notable variations in the realization patterns and functions of engagement markers across the corpora. It is observed that Czech graduates tend to underuse reader reference and questions, while overusing directives. Moreover, they generally struggle to approximate disciplinary patterns of engagement markers. This trend might reflect students’ limited awareness of academic rhetorical conventions, their efforts to blend L1 and L2 academic norms, and the unique context of addressing an audience within the examination framework of the Master’s thesis.
