The importance of affects, self-regulation and relationships in the writing of a master's thesis

ABSTRACT

While the number of postgraduate students is increasing, the writing of a master's dissertation still poses numerous challenges to them. The outcome of this work depends just as much on technical and methodological skills as on affects, self-regulation, and the relationship to the supervisor. In order to test a comprehensive model including all these dimensions for this specific task, we sent a questionnaire to students who had recently completed their master's thesis. The collected answers highlight the importance of the self-regulation of both cognition and affects in such an endeavor. The quality of the relationship with the supervisor is also essential. In light of these results, changes regarding the training of students and the coaching methods of supervisors seem necessary.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• emotion
• self-regulation
• supervision
• thesis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Bastien Wagener http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6782-0802