Are they prepared? Supporting Students in their dissertation projects

If there is one assignment that can terrify, confuse, but also excite a student, then that would probably be the dissertation. In the UK at least, when you reach year 3 of your undergraduate study you are confronted with this project and it seems overwhelmingly large and important. Whereas up to this point the student will probably have written assignments of around 1000-3000 words in length, suddenly they are expected to write something that is 10,000 words or more.

I have heard some people suggest breaking down the project into smaller chunks:

“Think of it as nothing more than writing three or four essays back-to-back, just with the added proviso that they need to link together”.

A dissertation isn’t quite so simple though. With essays students can often get away with relatively limited research skills, relying only on pre-supplied reading lists, and a vague notion of how libraries and e-resources work. They can still obtain a good grade.

To prepare for a dissertation, however, research skills and information literacy are suddenly required at a much higher level. Students need to be able to independently search out resources, analyse them, critically appraise, and come to conclusions, to an extent that might be unfamiliar to many of them. Even the research question itself needs to be one that they think up. In many cases, students will never have done that before, as the essay questions are selected from a list.

Do we teach students how to design a good research question?

Often the dissertation is the first time this is done. It’s truly a baptism by fire!

All of this is to say that the dissertation is a daunting prospect for students. Suddenly, they need to learn research skills that they have, up to that point, only touched upon in a limited way.

If the student then moves forward to a Masters degree, and then a PhD, the dissertation project doesn’t necessarily get much easier. With each step the project increases in word length, expectations surrounding the learning outcomes and grading criteria increase, and the skills and capabilities needed to successfully undertake the project expand exponentially.  

Support in universities

Whilst universities tend to provide various support services to help students through the dissertation project, it is probably true that these are rarely seen by the students as enough. Part of the problem might well be that the dissertation project is a test of a student’s ability to become an independent researcher. Not all students are ready for this or necessarily realise that they need to be.

From a student point of view the dissertation is often something that they muddle through and hope to find an okay or good grade at the end. Perhaps only the highest achievers manage to fully grasp its significance.

It seems, then, that we might be failing students in teaching them to be independent researchers. At school students are expected to follow step-by-step guidance to succeed mainly based on a prescribed set of materials. At university an attempt is made to get them to think for themselves and to explore more widely, but not enough time is necessarily given over to engraining a way of thinking that is truly independent.

“A way of thinking” is probably the right way to look at the problem. Students tend to work towards a grade because that is how they are best likely to succeed at university. However, the dissertation project tries to encourage a different way of thinking, one that encourages exploration of a subject beyond what is strictly necessary for writing 10,000 words. It’s about discovery, critical analysis, and finding resources for oneself. In many ways there is a disjoint between what the university is trying to teach students (independent research skills) and what they usually must do to be awarded a good grade (a more limited exploration of a subject, following a step-by-step process).

Online guidance modules

For a few years now I have been a Fellow of the Centre for Distance Education (CDE) at the University of London. The Centre draws together various experts in distance education to carry out research and produce analysis, interventions, and training materials (amongst much else). Its existence is mostly to add value to the University of London’s worldwide programme, offering London degrees across the world, but much of its work is equally beneficial to the Higher Education sector in general. One of the needs that were identified by CDE some years ago, was more support for the dissertation project.

I and several other CDE Fellows – Dr Clare Samson, David Baume, and Professor Stephen Brown – worked with Dr Sarah Singer (Institute of Commonwealth Studies) and a CDE Student Fellow, Tiffany Tupper, to find out more about the support offered in Worldwide for students beginning a dissertation project. The proposed output was to build a variety of online guides and modules that would provide an additional scaffold for students to learn how best to navigate the tricky prospect of writing a dissertation.

Thus, A Practical Guide to Projects and Dissertations was born. The guide is made up of a series of six modules offered as H5P resources and PDFs hosted in a publicly open Moodle platform (PORT). Each module guides students through a series of activities that are directly relevant and related to whatever topic they have chosen (or are about to choose) to undertake their dissertation project. These modules are:

• Clarifying the parameters of the assignment
• Identifying your research question, topic and title
• Identifying methodologies
• Using and managing sources and information
• Defining and prioritising tasks and managing time
• Conducting a literature review

These are provided as open educational resources (OERs) so if you work for an institution you are welcome to download copies of all or some of the files and upload them into your own VLE or LMS. This way the training can either be provided in one place or incorporated with other materials produced by your own institution. If preferred, the modules/guides can alternatively be worked on in PORT itself without the need to create an account.

Check out the modules here 

This blog post has been reposted to my Medium account. Here you can find other musings from me on topics such as climate change, self sufficiency, freelancing, and history.