Teachers’ diagnosis of students’ research skills during the mentoring of the undergraduate thesis

In higher education, students often write an undergraduate
thesis and receive one-to-one or small group support. During
mentoring, 10 teachers ideally diagnose students’ research skills,
to be able to adapt their support to students’ needs. In this
study, we aimed to answer the question of how mentors apply
the diagnostic phases of a diagnostic question, a diagnosis, a
diagnostic check and an intervention, during mentoring meetings
about 15 students’ research skills. Four mentors participated
in this multiple case study. Qualitative data were
gathered and sixteen videotaped mentoring meetings were
coded on the four diagnostic phases. The results were compared
within and between mentors, showing that mentors
asked several diagnostic questions, seldom articulated and
shared their diagnoses explicitly with students, and mainly
used interventions. We concluded that more support is needed
for mentors who do not automatically use their diagnostic
questions to formulate explicit diagnoses about students’
research skills.