Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation

by Barbara E. Lovitts

Despite their and other stakeholders’ consistent demand for excellence, doctoral programs have rarely, if ever, been assessed in terms of the quality of the dissertations departments produce. Yet dissertations provide the most powerful, objective measure of the success of a department’s doctoral program. Indeed, assessment, when done properly, can help departments achieve excellence by providing insight into a program’s strengths and weaknesses.This book and the groundbreaking study on which it is based is about making explicit to doctoral students the tacit “rules” for the assessment of the final of all final educational products―the dissertation. The purpose of defining performance expectations is to make them more transparent to graduate students while they are in the researching and writing phases, and thus to help them achieve to higher levels of accomplishment. Lovitts proposes the use of rubrics to clarify performance expectations–not to rate dissertations or individual components of dissertations to provide a summary score, but to facilitate formative assessment to support, not substitute for, the advising process. She provides the results of a study in which over 270 faculty from ten major disciplines―spanning the sciences, social sciences, and humanities―were asked to make explicit their implicit standards or criteria for evaluating dissertations. The book concludes with a summary of the practical and research implications for different faculty, departments, universities, disciplinary associations, accrediting organizations, and doctoral students themselves.The methods described can easily be adapted for the formative assessment of capstone courses, senior and master’s theses, comprehensive exams, papers, and journal articles.

Genres: Academia, Nonfiction

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rubrics system for dissertations. Focus groups across the disciplines. I'm unashamed of not having read the whole thing because second half is pretty much repetition within each discipline.


Surprising similar across disciplines (xiii)
Adams and White (1994) found dissertations lacked framework 5)
Review of lit shows “technical and indeterminate qualities” for external reviewers in UK/Aus and other requirement is “originalty and make a contribution” (7)
Lovitts (2001) shows that highly productive committee members “have different, more positive attitudes and beliefs about graduate students and graduate education and are more academically and socially engaged in with graduate students than their low-productive counterparts” (12).
Formative for students, sumative for assessment of program quality
Many ways to be “original contribution” (31).
Qutd “They really don’t know how tot forma n argument… take it all the way from teh sentence level all the way up to the entire dissertation level” (48).
amabile 1996, nickerson 1999, sternberg and lubart 1995 all show that when you choose your own topics you “are more internally motivated and exhibit higher levels or originality and creative performance” (74).
In sciences, zone of proxmial develoment with grad, post doc and technicians (75).
Brief warning that making “excellent” standard may scare out some A-level students

[Dr. Kat]

not so helpful since i'm not writing dissertation yet, but it was a nice to see a breakdown of dissertation expectations among various disciplines