Teaching Research Methods and the Supervision of Undergraduate Projects: Seeking Practical Improvements to a Complex Process

This paper develops a review of teaching research methods and student supervisor relationships, first presented to ECRM20. Last year we tested an extensive literature review with a survey of undergraduate business students, this has now been supplemented with further survey data, interviews and a focus group. This supplementary data has deepened our understanding of the issues and has largely reinforced the findings from the previous paper. At a time when some schools are moving content on-line and seeking new forms of assessment, there is a need to ensure that research continues to fulfil a contribution towards intellectual and practical understanding. Detailed analysis has explored the extent to which the teaching of research methods within a taught degree course and the completion of an individual project has proved effective. Value perceived by the students and supervisors of a major project has been confirmed to influence both success for a candidate at an interview as well as providing a skill set suitable for longer term employment. Learning ‘skills for life’ was suggested by the students.. The extent to which students and supervisors engage was explored and opportunities for improvement are reported. The importance of adding an element of fun to the process was also raised. Little evidence of supervisors receiving training was found, Feather et al (2010, 2013) and a challenge continues to be the extent to which supervisors are fully briefed on the required dissertation process. In practice, supervisors rely on their own prior experience and this can contribute to an uneven quality of experience for students. Conclusions on the undergraduate data are developed for two specific research questions and next steps for improvement at the school are outlined for the Business School to consider.

Internal Tensions of Building a Dissertation through the Lens of Black Finesse: Toward Decolonizing Higher Education

In this paper, I focus on the process of building a dissertation that honored the Black souls of my undergraduate participants along with my own Black soul as a form of resistance to advance racial equity in higher education. Through endarkened narrative inquiry, this paper will address the internal tensions I navigated in building a dissertation that centered Blackness through the prism of what I have conceptualized as Black Finesse. I unveil components from my dissertation that manifested a shift in how knowledge generation can be developed and written. I conceptualized a methodology entitled race-grounded phenomenology (RGP) and call for a re-imagining of qualitative research around the ways Black students navigate higher education. I reflected upon the internal tensions and mental leaps of my dissertation process through theoretical decolonial inquiry. As decolonial praxis to unmake the canon of research and dissertation creation, I lean upon four elements of decolonizing higher education as a way to reimagine decolonial futures that were actualized via my dissertation process.

Moving Past Disconnected Hurdles

This article argues for the need to significantly adjust the process and focus of the educational thesis and dissertation to better match the preparation and needs of students who are practitioners in order to help these students become stronger and better educators and leaders. To that end, the article presents innovative approaches to improve experiences for graduate students who are developing, conducting and completing master’s degree theses and doctoral dissertations in the field of education. The vast majority of students who pursue master’s or doctoral degrees in education do not intend to become researchers or university faculty. Rather, most of these students are looking to improve their skills as teachers and educational leaders, and will likely never conduct a major research effort beyond the thesis or dissertation. While these students have a great deal of practical experience in their field, most of them have had little or no exposure to graduate level research, scholarly literature or academic writing. Recognizing that research skills including data collection and analysis, and academic writing are essential skills for all graduate students including those in educational programs, these skills alone are inadequate in preparing educators for the realities they face as they work to conduct multi-tiered and multi-faceted research that will affect positive change and contribute to the field to improve overall student success. For many of these students the thesis and dissertation, while a significant requirement for the degree, are viewed as major “hurdles” that are too often disconnected from the realities and complexities of the classroom and administrative office. Appropriate theoretical and conceptual frameworks are used to examine how the educational thesis and dissertation process can be improved to better serve the needs of educational practitioners. This includes the use of Role AcquisitionTheory (Thornton & Nardi, 1975) to examine and help facilitate the intrinsic change process in graduate students in education during the thesis and dissertation process. Transformative Learning Framework (Cranton, 2016) is used to better understand and advance developmental changes and scaffolding that are necessary to examine problematic frames of reference, openly reflect, and to emotionally change from the experience. The Loss/Momentum Framework (RP Group, 2012) is used in two separate ways; first to scrutinize specific institutional barriers and supports that exist in graduate and doctoral programs in education as well throughout the university that influence the process of completing the thesis and dissertation. Second, it is used to identify and examine individual characteristics, skills, and attributes of these students that serve as either barriers or assets to completing a meaningful thesis or dissertation. Practical recommendations for improving the educational thesis and dissertation process are provided, and mentoring and strategic coaching approaches discussed.

Training Partners for the Long Haul

This chapter seeks to provide the background, benefits, and design of writing groups created to aid doctoral candidates in the completion of the dissertation process. Literature will be used to support the rationale for such groups and will outline the structure that can be used to create and support doctoral students in peer groups by their dissertation chair or facilitator. In this chapter, specific guidelines for the creation of the groups and the role of the chair are outlined, and suggestions for remedying dysfunctional groups or group members. While ultimately the doctoral candidate is responsible for the successful completion and defense of his or her own research, peer groups can be instrumental in promoting task completion and task satisfaction.

Process Considerations for the Development and Assessment of Virtual Education Doctorates

This chapter focuses on the use of a customized backward instructional design process used to re-engineer a virtual university's integration of institutional learning outcomes within a practice-based online dissertation process for a doctorate in education (EdD). The EdD will incorporate specialization areas in instructional design, learning analytics, and e-learning and through a lens of best assessment practices for doctoral education. This program will highlight the unique considerations for virtual environments especially those that incorporate asynchronous instructional elements in program and course design. The education doctorate is leadership-based and practitioner-focused to prepare candidates as scholar practitioners who utilize the learning outcomes for research-based decision making and problem solutions within their scope of practice. A new three chapter dissertation allows candidates to solve a practice-based problem as a culminating doctoral learning activity which will be assessed across institutional outcomes and expectations.

The Dissertation Journey

This book is practical, guided, and forthright on what is needed to get started with the dissertation process. Its format is simple to and easy to read as it is broken down into chapters with information in each chapter outlined on its own page. This simple and uncomplicated format is a pleasure to read and it will not overwhelm doctoral students who are looking to move into this process of their academic careers. I strongly believe that authors Roberts and Hyatt have successfully accomplished their stated purpose for this text.

Fostering Motivation When Virtually Mentoring Online Doctoral Students

Online learning in higher education has become commonplace as more working adults and nontraditional aged students return to pursue advanced degrees. Graduate education, specifically, has grown in recent years (Allen & Seaman, 2014), including doctoral degrees. Pursuing a doctoral degree requires writing a culminating paper (e.g., dissertation, doctoral study, capstone study). Writing and conducting such a study requires support and mentorship from faculty of the program. Establishing a positive relationship in which the student feels supported by the mentor is crucial to encourage dialogue and motivation throughout the process. In this case study, online doctoral students’ perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness were investigated, along with how these connections with their dissertation chair influenced students’ motivation to make progress. Results show that feelings of relatedness were crucial to the students’ motivation to continue in the doctoral study and dissertation process. Also, internal locus of control motivated students to complete their doctoral study and dissertation.