Supervisor and Student Perspectives on Undergraduate Thesis Supervision in Higher Education

Diagnosing teachers are teachers who perceive diagnostic information
about students’ learning process, interpret these aspects, decide how to
respond, and act based on this diagnostic decision. During supervision
meetings about the undergraduate thesis supervisors make in-themoment
decisions while interacting with their students. We regarded
research supervision as a teaching process for the supervisor and a
learning process for the student. We tried to grasp supervisors’ in-themoment
decisions and students’ perceptions of supervisors’ actions.
Supervisor decisions and student perceptions were measured with
video-stimulated recall interviews and coded using a content analysis
approach. The results showed that the in-the-moment decisions our
supervisors made had a strong focus on student learning. Supervisors
often asked questions to empower students or to increase student
understanding. These supervising strategies seemed to be adapted to
students’ needs, as the latter had positive perceptions when their
control increased or when they received stimuli to think for themselves