Thesis Tool Kit

Project introduction and background information

When students start on their MSc thesis project, they are often unsure about the different steps to be taken. Especially data analysis can be a real hurdle, which is often mentioned during informal chats during the thesis ring meetings. In some cases, students in principle are supposed to have the knowledge and skills to perform the data-analysis, given that they have completed courses for that. The problem is that the students do not recognize or remember this as such possibly because most essential courses were covered in their BSc years ago. In other cases, the students do not have the knowledge, given that the activities of their thesis subject do not completely match their master specialization or the selected optional courses. Regarding the latter, the increased attention for flexible learning in higher education and boundary crossing between disciplines will make the problem described here even more relevant in the near future.

In addition to the (perceived) lack of data analyses knowledge, students perceive the data-analysis part of the thesis as highly stressful, which hampers an efficient approach from the student to find effective solutions to this. A coping strategy that we often notice is that students are searching for Youtube tutorials, while they actually do not know what solution to what problem they want to find. Thus, to reduce this cognitive overload, students writing their MSc thesis need more cognitive and mental guidance for the data-analysis part of their thesis, resulting in more time and mental space for more in-depth scientific reasoning of the overall thesis.

Objective and expected outcomes

Our objective is to bridge the gap between knowledge and skills of the followed courses during the BSc and MSc phase and the skills needed to execute the MSc thesis to have a more effective and efficient thesis process.

We expected the following outcomes: 

• Time spent on in-depth content and reasoning will increase, while time spent on obtaining knowledge and skills to perform the thesis will decrease, resulting in higher quality theses.
• The supervisor will benefit as well from this, as a higher quality thesis can more easily be used as input for a scientific publication (e.g. part of a PhD thesis project).
• Less mental stress, and less cognitive overload for the students.

Results and learnings

We had the following deliverables in our initial plan: 

• a podcast series where students exchange thesis experiences. 
• knowledge clips to bridge knowledge gaps
• a starting form (formative assessment) to identify these knowledge gaps and to identify potential hurdles during the process. 

We started our project with: 

• A brainstorm session with students
• Meetings with all staff involved in the thesis (among others) coordinators, statistician, lab staff)