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What students want: a study on the role of the supervisor of final works in computing education

Published: 15 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

At two European universities providing technical and general computing education, we conducted a survey of undergraduate and graduate student experiences with final thesis work. We focused on the needs of students, role of their supervisor, and perception of institutional scaffolding. Learning style as a background variable was measured using the Need for Cognition instrument. From a sample of 44 responses we draw conclusions that inform computing educators about the wished-for approaches and support for final thesis work that seem necessary from the student point-of-view. These include the highlighted need for expert advice, time management issues and significant correlations between the required expert support and need for cognition.

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      Koli Calling '12: Proceedings of the 12th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
      November 2012
      187 pages
      ISBN:9781450317955
      DOI:10.1145/2401796
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      • Univ. Eastern Finland: University of Eastern Finland
      • Tampere University of Technology
      • Univ. Turku: University of Turku
      • Aalto University

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 15 November 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. MSc. & BSc. final thesis
      2. need for cognition
      3. supervision
      4. thesis supervisor

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      Koli Calling '12
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      • Univ. Eastern Finland
      • Univ. Turku

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