Supervisor-Student Research Meetings: A Case Study on Choice of Tools and Practices in Computer Science

Abstract

Supervisory meetings are a crucial aspect of graduate studies and have a strong impact on the success of research and supervisorstudent relations, yet there is little research on supporting this relationship and even less on understanding the nature of this collaboration and user requirements. Thus, we conducted an exploratory study on the choice and success of tools and practices used by supervisors and students for meetings, for the purpose of making informed design recommendations. Results of a series of five focus groups and three individual interviews yielded three themes on: 1) supervisory style diversity, 2) distributed cognition demands, and 3) feedback channel dissonance. Student-supervisor collaboration has many unexplored areas for design and as a first step our work highlights potential areas for supportive designs and future research.

Keywords: student-supervisor collaboration; supervisory meeting; tools and practices; exploratory study; thematic analysis

You can find the pdf version of the paper below.

This research was initially conducted as a course project under supervision of Prof. Joanna McGrenere at UBC. See course webpage here: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~cs554m/