Title: What supervisors expect of education masters students before they engage in supervised research: a Delphi study

Authors: Gavin T.L. Brown

Addresses: School of Learning, Development and Professional Practice, Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 91029, Auckland 1142, New Zealand

Abstract: What education students need to know and be able to do prior to engaging in independent research is contested. This paper reports a Delphi study of registered supervisors in one faculty of education in a research intensive university in New Zealand. After one round of data collection from supervisors, they rated 212 expectations aggregated into ten themes. Highly valued expectations were in search, speaking, writing and thinking skills as well as self-regulation ability and supervisor characteristics. Forty expectations were identified by three administrators as being highly suited to teaching in a research methods course but the correlation to the value given by supervisors was close to zero. This study illustrates the challenges facing the preparation of students for independent research in the face of methodological diversity.

Keywords: research methods courses; independent research; supervisor expectations; Masters students; quantitative research; education students; supervisors; Delphi study; New Zealand; methodological diversity; teacher education; teacher training.

DOI: 10.1504/IJQRE.2014.060983

International Journal of Quantitative Research in Education, 2014 Vol.2 No.1, pp.69 - 88

Received: 21 May 2013
Accepted: 10 Feb 2014
Published online: 02 Jul 2014 *

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