Last modified: 2012-05-14
Abstract
The motivation behind this study was to raise the quality of bachelor and master students’ thesis writing. Important concerns were the low completion rate as well as the inability of many students who go through the thesis course to complete the written thesis within the stipulated time period. This is not an issue at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences only, but it is also a wider national and international concern.
Our study aimed to answer the following questions:
- How is the distribution of responsibility between student and supervisor perceived, by the students and supervisors respectively, in thesis work?
- How do self-regulated learning (SRL) and co-operation oriented learning correlate with study success?
Method: In order to investigate these issues we used an intervention by matching data between supervisor and student and examined the result to answer the questions. The information was partly retrieved using the thesis support system SciPro. This paper describes the systems semi-automatic matching of opinions among 45 supervisors and 180 students with regard to their respective responsibilities in the thesis writing process at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Vermunt’s instrument Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS) was employed in order to measure students’ self-regulated learning (SRL). The internal consistency of the instrument was examined in the context of BA and MA students.
Results: Students and supervisors have surprisingly similar expectations of responsibilities represented by 19 items in this study. The few cases where a student and supervisor pair had diametrically different perceptions did not correlate with lower academic success. The SLR part of ILS and the part measuring cooperation as a learning orientation was found to have good internal consistence and to be applicable in this educational setting. Students who measured high values for SLR and on Co-operation did not succeed better than others in their thesis writing. Overall, the relation between SRL and a completed thesis is not as strong as expected. The results of this study so far, will be the foundation of further work on the technology-enhanced thesis work and on students behavior, expectations of responsibilities and outcomes. The students and supervisors’ expectations will also be analyzed in relation to their use of the SciPro system.
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