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.
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.
Shortly after being offered the opportunity to review for readers of Studies in American Indian Literatures a disparate collection of books, one about and three by N. Scott Momaday, and very shortly ...after accepting the offer, I asked myself the proverbial, yet still troubling, question, "Now what have I gotten myself into?" Since a review provides summary and evaluation of a work under consideration, I immediately struggled with a way to bring order to a review of four works clumped together for the present purpose, recognizing that each of these wonderful works was deserving of its own specific and separate scrutiny. What I reacted to at first as a disconnected grouping is actually a collection that accurately reflects Momaday s range of styles and purposes, and in so doing it is a collection accurately reflective of Momaday himself: a Kiowa (one raised among the Navajos and Pueblo peoples), an academic (Emily Dickinson scholar, expert on Billy the Kid), a teacher (of high school and college students), Gourd Dancer, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, an essayist, poet, painter, and narrator.
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF LEARNING: PERSPECTIVES FROM SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION. John H. Schumann, Sheila E. Crowell, Nancy E. Jones,
Namhee Lee, Sara Ann Schuchert, and Lee Alexandra Wood. Mahwah, NJ:
...Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. xiii + 212. $59.95 cloth, $34.50 paper. This volume is an attempt to relate neuroscience research to cognitive
metaphors (e.g., auditory loop, Universal Grammar UG,
fossilization) used by SLA researchers and psycholinguists to describe
language acquisition. The volume consists of six chapters, originally
master's theses and PhD qualifying papers, and an introduction and
conclusion by Schumann. The chapters review literature that pertains to
the neurobiology of six subtopics: aptitude, motivation, procedural
memory, declarative memory, memory consolidation, and attention. In the
preface, Schumann suggests that the purpose of the volume is “to
promote a neurobiology of language that starts with the brain and moves to
behavior” (p. xi), although he acknowledges one page later that
“empirical research on the hypothesized mechanisms may be some time
off” (p. xii). The volume aims to convince the intended readership,
SLA researchers who might know little or no neurobiology, that investing
time in the study of the neuroscience of learning is critical to the
field's progression.
•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.
United Kingdom Fairclough, Adam
Academe,
07/1999, Volume:
85, Issue:
4
Trade Publication Article
In the UK, Margaret Thatcher abolished tenure. Now overcrowded campuses and rigid quotas for research are further demoralizing British faculty members.
According to the author, this book represents more than ten years of research at libraries in the United States and Great Britain. Each biographical entry includes a personal history, a narrative ...describing the subject's early political career, details on their election to the office of Speaker of the House, excerpts from their acceptance speeches, a summary of political leadership and other activities while holding the office, and a summary of their political activities (if any) and life after leaving the Speakership.
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.
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