Several researchers have suggested the importance of being responsive to students' needs in research supervision. Adapting support strategies to students' needs in light of the goals of a task is ...referred to as adaptivity. In the present study, the practice of adaptivity is explored by interviewing expert thesis supervisors about diagnosing student characteristics in order to determine students' needs and concurrent adaptive support strategies. The findings suggest that next to competence, supervisors also diagnose elements of students' determination and context. With respect to support strategies, it is suggested that supervisors adapt to student needs in terms of explicating standards, quality or consequences, division of responsibilities, providing more/less critical feedback and sympathising. The complexity of the relationship between diagnosing student characteristics and adapting support strategies is illustrated and needs further study.
This book is for graduate students--and others--who want to become more productive writers. It's especially written for those who want to: •increase their motivation, focus, and persistence to move a ...project to completion •overcome procrastination and perfectionistic tendencies •reduce (or write in spite of) their anxiety and fear of writing •manage their time, work, energy (and advisor) for greater productivityWhile Jan Allen recognizes that writing is not an innate talent for most of us, she demonstrates that it is a process based on skills which we can identify, learn, practice and refine. She focuses both on the process and habits of writing as well as on helping you uncover what kind of writeryou are, and reflect on your challenges and successes. With a light touch and an engaging sense of humor, she proposes strategies to overcome procrastination and distractions, and build a writing practice to enable you to become a more productive and prolific writer.
Writing in a second (L2)/foreign language is generally a challenging activity, and writing an MA thesis, as an example of academic enterprise, can be daunting when done in a language in which the ...writer is not fully competent. The challenge such a genre of writing poses for L2 writers has not been properly addressed. To fill in the gap in this area, the present study aimed at comparing Master's theses written by Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) students in three Iranian universities in terms of the challenges such academic writing poses for student-writers. The corpus comprised 60 randomly selected theses from those universities submitted to English as a Foreign Language departments between the years 2010 and 2012. A series of one-way ANOVAs were employed to compare the means of obtained frequencies across the theses. Results revealed that, except for organisational problems, theses varied in terms of language, style, content and methodological problems. It was also found that theses mainly suffer from style and language problems. The study sheds light on the extent to which L2 writers are aware of the structure of MA theses, reveals the challenges common to most students in this particular type of academic writing and offers advice on improving the quality of thesis-writing.
The keyword lists are rich in terminology and as such, they are also characterized by great semantic ambiguity, which presents the problems of synonymy and polysemy typical of uncontrolled language, ...which is both an advantage and a drawback. However, assigning keywords has gained particular importance in the current open scientific communication ecosystem in digital environments, mainly in the academic dissertation and repositories of theses.
This article reports a study on the organization of knowledge, using subject-access metadata of master's theses from the digital repository of the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, applying analytical techniques to a big amount of data. The objective was to analyze the number of keywords in each record and keywords repeated in the title and abstracts of the dissertations in Portuguese and English. The analysis of the 48,501 metadata records of master's theses submitted to the repository, between 2001 and 2019, presents a total of 223,867 keywords in Portuguese, with an average of 4.62 keywords per record, and a total of 216,521 keywords in English, equivalent to an average of 4.59 per record. Although, the attribution of keywords in Portuguese and English by the author is an economic way to expand access to the content of theses and dissertations in institutional repositories, it is necessary to define rules for authors about the choice of keywords and the preparation of the abstract, as well as its translation into English. The task of controlling keywords requires a partnership between authors and librarians who can enrich the quality of indexing languages.
There is increasing impetus for higher-degree-by-research students to publish during candidature. Research performance, including higher degree completions and publication output, commonly determines ...university funding, and doctorates with publishing experience are better positioned for a career in softening academic labour markets. The PhD by Publication provides a pathway for candidates to foster and demonstrate their publishing capabilities. It also provides existing academics a means of achieving doctoral status while managing the 'publish or perish' milieu endemic to their work. This paper clarifies the precise nature and significance of the PhD by Publication pathway in the Australian context and discusses the associated benefits and problems, enriched by personal experience. It summarises factors pertinent to assessing the pathway's suitability. The review of current policy suggests institutional guidelines in universities nationwide are inadequate for producing theses of comparable quality to conventional dissertations and capitalising on the pathway's significant benefits.
Abstract
Background
Completing a master thesis (MT) is mandatory in many undergraduate curricula in medicine but a specific educational framework to guide the supervisor-student relationship during ...the MT has not been published. This could be helpful to facilitate the MT process and to more effectively reach the learning objectives related to science education in medicine. An attractive model for this purpose is the ‘Educational Alliance’ (EA), which focusses on the three components ‘
clarity and agreement on (a) goals, (b) tasks and (c) relationship & roles
’. This study investigated factors that can either facilitate or hinder the process of MTs, and related these to the components of the EA.
Methods
We conducted semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 20 students and – separately – with their 20 corresponding supervisors, after the MT had been accepted. The interviews included open questions on factors facilitating or hindering the success of the MT. Audio recordings of the interviews were anonymized and transcribed, and then analysed by qualitative content analysis. Also, quantitative data were gathered on satisfaction with the MT process and the supervisory quality (using Likert-type questions).
Results
We were able to analyse all 40 interviews, related to 20 MTs. From the transcripts, we extracted 469 comments related to the research question and categorized these into the four main categories (a) ‘Preparation’, (b) ‘Process’, (c) ‘Atmosphere’, (d) ‘Value of the MT’. Interviewees highlighted the importance of a careful preparation phase, clear expectations, a clear research plan, thorough and timely feedback, mutual agreement on timelines, and a positive working atmosphere. Each of these factors could be brought in line with the three components of the EA framework:
agreement and clarity of goals, tasks, relationships & roles.
Satisfaction with the MT process was rated 8.75 ± 1.22 SD (of 10) points by supervisors, and 7.80 ± 1.61 SD points by students, while supervision quality was rated
+
1.51 ± 0.63 SD (scale from − 2 to + 2) by supervisors, and
+
1.26 ± 0.93 SD by students.
Conclusion
We propose the EA framework as a useful guidance for students, supervisors, and the university towards conducting successful MTs in medicine. Based on the findings, we provide specific recommendations for students, supervisors, and university.
Supervising masters and doctoral dissertations is a key function of teaching in higher education and giving written feedback on draft sections is an essential component of this function. However, the ...specific types of response that supervisors give to their dissertation students' written work have received limited research interest to date. The present study drew on an academic discourse community perspective in examining feedback comments on draft sections of dissertations across three disciplinary areas. It investigated which aspects of writing the comments focused on and how the comments were formulated linguistically, and developed descriptive frameworks that may be of value to supervisors wishing to reflect on their practice. Findings are discussed in relation to supervisors' perspectives, academic discourse community expectations and norms of supervisory communication.
Academic supervision of PhD dissertations and master's theses has traditionally been conceptualised as the pedagogy of the dyadic relationship between master and apprentice. Recently, researchers ...have argued for a more systemic approach. Yet, many communities lack practices for sharing the pedagogical responsibility of supervision. Consequently, individual teachers face the challenges of supervision alone. We have been involved in university pedagogical training where these challenges are explored. Data consist of 44 academics' learning tasks, from which we analysed to what extent and how supervision is interpreted as a social activity, and what kind of cultural elements appear in the teachers' discourses. We adopted the sociocultural approach to discourse analysis and treat the academics' experiences as reflections of their wider culture. A traditional supervisory discourse pervaded much of the challenges we identified in the academics' descriptions; however, there was also evidence of an aspiring process-orientated dialogical supervision discourse.
This study is conducted in the context of a Spanish Business School, applied to different Master degree programme. The objective is focused on the identification of which generic skills are needed ...and developed in a Final master thesis (FMT). Therefore, this study is double folded. On the one hand we use a survey to ask the students which generic skills they consider that should be needed and developed in their FMT, and on the other, we explore the elaboration process as well as validation process of tools to gather information and evidences in order to assess the final results of the FMT being submitted by the students at the end of their learning journey. Specifically, this paper develops the preliminary results approach to the identification of the competencies from the student’s perspective.
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