K EY FINDINGS

To receive a bachelor’s degree from a Finnish UAS, the student is required to produce a thesis or dissertation with the scope of 10–15 ECTS in his field of professional studies. These theses form one small component in the national RDI policies that aim to support and develop local and regional business and economy. In 2014, UAS students produced and published a total of 22 553 bachelor theses. This is an indicator of the multitude of students, faculty and working life organizations that are somehow involved in the UAS bachelor thesis process annually. This equals hundreds of thousands of hours and innumerable advising sessions and meetings annually.

The literature review covered a wide range of international and Finnish research reports on UG dissertations and effective methods for teaching research skills. The review concluded with the finding that there were no prior studies focusing specifically on the planning stage of the dissertation or on student experiences of this stage. From the methodological viewpoint, only one superficially relevant study used GT as the research strategy. Thus, to fill this substantive and methodological gap in research, the current research focus was chosen, and GT selected as the qualitative research strategy to explore students’ experiences.

The objective of this study was to find out how undergraduate UAS students in business experience the first stages of the UAS thesis process, specifically, the thesis planning stage. The study was implemented over a 14-month month period from October 2011 to January 2013 whilst teaching five different implementations of the Thesis Planning Workhop with a total of 138 participants. The data consisted of documentary data gathered from students in the form of student emails and stories, and of participant observation notes taken by me on one-on-one faculty–student consultancy sessions and classroom situations. A total of 448 items of data were gathered and analysed into 899 rows of code.

The key outcome of the study was presented in the form of a substantive grounded theory focused around the core category getting the thesis plan done. This category expressed the key problem the student needed to resolve. The theory highlighted the internal mental experiences of the student through the categories of motivation, metacognition, cognition and emotions, the stakeholders in the thesis process (student, peers, working life representatives, faculty), and the student’s social experience arising as these four stakeholders interacted through bilateral and tripartite relationships. Bilateral relationships included student–working life interaction, student–

faculty interaction, student–peer interaction and peer–faculty interaction. Tripartite relationships included the triads of student–working life–faculty interaction and student–peer–faculty interaction. Additionally, a quadripartite model of interaction and collaboration was proposed, in which these four stakeholders would collaborate and develop together. Each of these categories was described in further detail through their properties and the dimensions of the properties. The substantive grounded theory utilizing in-vivo codes was presented in chapter 3, page 124, and a scaled up or more generalized version of the theory in chapter 4, page 142.

Findings clearly indicated that whether the students were motivated or not to engage in the thesis process, they felt either suitably or overly challenged by it. This was evident in the motivational and emotional changes and challenges during the process, and the metacognitive and cognitive issues students wrestled with. Student’s ability to take action to resolve the problem of getting done depended on whether the internal mental experience supported active and successful behavior individually and as a member in the interaction processes with three other stakeholders.

Students consulted faculty on issues of motivation and emotion, and a variety of metacognitive and cognitive challenges related to the RDI process to receive assistance to manage themselves, the thesis planning process and the negotiations with working life.

The majority of students experienced commissioned theses as a motivating opportunity for professional learning, career building and networking. However, negotiation, communication and collaboration between students and working life organizations did also prove to be a problematic area for three reasons. Firstly, students themselves were not always knowledgeable, experienced, skilled or self-reliant enough to negotiate and collaborate successfully with organizations independently. Secondly, whilst many working life organizations were eager to work with young professionals, committed to build functioning collaboration relationship, and skilled at supporting the student during the thesis planning process, this was not true of all organizations. Students who contracted with organizations that were neither eager, willing, nor skilled at collaborating with and supporting the student experienced at times severe motivational, cognitive and emotional challenges. In many occasions, this resulted in weeks’ or even months’ long delays in the thesis

process, and great frustration for the students involved. Thirdly, students needed and requested faculty advising to prepare to contact and negotiate with working life organizations. Additionally, students needed extra faculty assistance in cases where working life organizations were not forthcoming enough with the requisite information, or requested the students to engage in RDI projects with much too wide a scope from the academic viewpoint. Faculty was usually in contact with the working life organization only vicariously through the student. This made communication unnecessarily complex, inefficient and prone to errors. Few faculty met with the student and the organization for a shared tripartite dialogue although much UAS pedagogic literature calls for this.

Students experienced faculty advising mostly useful in terms of building motivation, managing negative emotions, processing cognitively challenging issues, and getting ready to do.

Advising was often the requisite for student to start or to continue with his doing. Students were very appreciative of timely, competent, committed and encouraging advising provision by easy-to-approach faculty. Not all faculty was willing or able to offer such services, however. Students disappointed with faculty advising attributed the problem to faculty’s lack of interest, time and competence to advise students. In cases where difficult working life relationships coincided with unsuccessful thesis advising, students easily lost motivation, and experienced negative emotions and frustration toward working life representatives and faculty.

Lastly, at least initially, some students were unappreciative of or openly negative about the use of peer advising and peer debriefing sessions. After a few sessions, those open to social learning approaches grew to understand the benefits they could receive and the assistance they could offer to peers, while mutually beneficial learning was taking place. For these students peer advising became a positive force in the thesis planning process: it helped resolve difficulties, generate new ideas, and bring up new questions in the student’s discussions with faculty. Some students were, however, either unwilling or unable to benefit from peer and faculty advising. This tended to result in low quality thesis plans, and delays and dropping out from the thesis process.

The overall dynamic of the substantive grounded theory relies on the synergy, firstly, between the student’s internal mental processes of motivation, metacognition, cognition and emotion, and secondly, between the student and the other stakeholders in the social experience process. If all these components are positive, a positive cycle tends to ensue. If even one of these components is negative, a negative synergy may ensue. Faculty as the facilitator of learning processes is in a crucial role to ensure that the cycle becomes and remains supportive of learning.