‘The material you’re working with is yourself’: Student Learning Experiences with Thesis Writing
Abstract
After the adoption of the Bologna declaration (1999), bachelor’s and master’s theses have become almost universal across Europe as dissertations that students have to write at the end of a study cycle. Although still relatively under-researched compared to doctoral theses, there is an increasing body of work focusing on various aspects of the bachelor’s/master’s thesis writing process such as supervision (e.g. Ädel et al., 2023; Augustsson & Jaldemark, 2014; Dysthe et al., 2006; Harwood & Petrić, 2017; Hu et al., 2016; Roberts & Seaman, 2018), institutional support (e.g. Dragomir & Dumitru, 2023; Eriksson et al., 2021) and student experiences and emotions (e.g. Henttonen et al., 2023a; Hintsanen & Pyhältö, 2018; Karlsholm et al., 2023; see also Chapter 7 in this volume). Several studies have also examined bachelor’s and master’s theses in relation to learning (e.g. Henttonen et al., 2023b; Mendoza et al., 2022) and these studies show that bachelor’s and master’s thesis writing is a complex learning experience during which students experience different types of learning. However, we do not yet have a clear understanding of when and how learning occurs during the thesis writing process from a student perspective or how students conceive of their own learning processes. The objective of this study was to capture how students conceptualise their own learning during the bachelor’s and master’s thesis writing process by analysing interviews in which master’s and bachelor’s students from several European countries were asked to reflect on their learning experiences during the journey of writing their thesis. Specifically, we analysed our dataset asking two main questions:
(1) What are the main features of students’ learning trajectories?
(2) What are the students’ perceptions of how they learned?