How to communicate the research direction with the tutor

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confused

Choosing a topic is an important first step for graduate students to write their graduation thesis.

There are usually two ways to choose a theme:

The first is that the tutor will arrange it directly. This benefit is due to the tutor's understanding of related fields, and the assigned topics are already valuable and necessary for research. As long as graduate students are familiar with relevant research seriously, they can get started and integrate quickly.

But what I said above is an ideal situation. Many students may lack enough interest in the research topics assigned by their tutors. At first, because of novelty, I contacted and tried with the idea of giving it a try. But once the biggest driving force of scientific research-interest is exhausted, then the next step is to give up or be passive.

Most tutors often don't assign the core links of their important projects to novice graduate students. Because if it is screwed up or delayed for a long time, the consequences will be very serious.

Therefore, more often, the way you choose multiple-choice items will be as follows.

The second way is for students to choose their own topics according to their own research interests. In addition to being motivated by interest, we should persist in scientific research. There is also a hidden advantage of this kind of topic selection, that is, students can fully consider their own expertise and ability when selecting topics, and try to choose topics that they can control.

For tutors, through topic selection and implementation, suitable students can also be screened out and gradually incorporated into the important tasks of their own topics.

It sounds like everyone is happy. Isn't it? But reality, which is so pleasant? Looking through the chat records of students and tutors in the topic selection stage is like witnessing the scene of a car accident, which is really terrible.

Many students send such communication information to their teachers:

Teacher, I read XX documents and decided to choose XXXXXXX as the topic. what do you think?

It is good for teachers to ignore you. There may even be a storm of criticism. You may feel wronged-teacher, you think the topic is not good, so why don't I change it? Lose your temper? Then a few days later, you sent this again:

Teacher, I read the file of XX again and decided to re-select the topic XXXXXXX. Is this ok?

Then another criticism came again ... after several times, it is estimated that you are very frustrated. If there is a glimmer of hope, you really want to stop doing your graduation thesis. On the other hand, the teacher has classified you as "unreliable".

What the hell happened?

misunderstand

In fact, the tension between you and your tutor at this time stems from some misunderstandings caused by the lack of assumptions.

I'll tell you what the tutor thinks at this time:

You are lazy and didn't read the literature well;

You choose a topic, don't even verify it yourself, and directly throw the responsibility for verification to the tutor;

Never change after repeated instruction. I told you not to choose topics and communicate so hastily, but you did the right thing.

You see, he is angry for a reason. I'll tell you later what he expects you to do and why you can't skip these jobs.

According to the table on the tutor's side, I will tell you where you are wrong:

First of all, you regard the paper as a composition. It's not all your fault. Because you have received effective training for so many years, it is estimated that you are writing a composition. I started writing in the lower grades of primary school and wrote until the college entrance examination. Of course, after that, there was a lack of composition training in the whole undergraduate stage, which led to a decline in the level compared with high school.

In your opinion, as long as you have something to say, wouldn't it be nice to make up the number of words? Although the college entrance examination composition is 800 words, the master's thesis is 30000 words. But if you can write 800 words in 40 minutes, then 30 thousand words are nothing more than a few more nights. At most, I use the legendary artifact SPSS to make some charts and post them. Everything is ready except the east wind. What you are worse than is to pass the examination and approval of the topic by the tutor.

Teacher, why are you embarrassing me? Do you look knowledgeable?

But a paper is really not a composition. Writing a composition is like keeping a diary, at least you can write it for yourself. Whether others like it or not is none of your business. But paper can't. The paper must have been written for someone else. Moreover, this "other person" is really not just anyone. I'll tell you in detail later.

If you think you can make up enough words, you think this topic is optional. This is the experience of building a henhouse. Thinking about Gai Lou is not a way at all. It was really for your own good that the tutor stopped you in time.

Secondly, you don't know how to verify the question. In your opinion, as a novice, you have no way to test whether the topic is appropriate. So the cooperative relationship between you and your tutor is that you propose the topic and the tutor verifies the topic.

No!

In the teacher's opinion, what you should do is:

Bring up a topic

Verification theme

By default, you have passed the first year of undergraduate and graduate training, and you have learned the method of tacit cooperation to verify the questions. What the tutor has to do is to test whether your verification process is reasonable. So, you didn't finish what you should have done at all, only handed in a semi-finished product. So in the eyes of the tutor, it only means that you want to be lazy.

Third, you haven't learned how to communicate with your tutor. Cooperation between people is based on effective communication. This requires you to know what the other party's information needs are.

As a tutor, he wants to see you choose and verify a suitable topic through your own reasonable methods and steps as the basis for his further guidance and improvement. At this time, if the other party's needs are not met, you should ask and listen to the other party's opinions carefully. In this way, many potential misunderstandings above can be gradually resolved and solved.

However, if you just stick to your own presupposition in your mind, you don't seek feedback from your tutor at all, or even your tutor clearly conveys your opinions to you, but you still choose to ignore them all and continue to go your own way, then your communication results will naturally be very bad.

In view of the above misunderstanding and dilemma, I wrote this article for you. I hope it can help you to establish an effective communication channel between you and your tutor and make your scientific research work progress more smoothly.

Let's get started.

reader

China has a saying, called:

I can't do anything. I'm exhausted.

Be sure to understand the needs of your customers. To do this, you must first know who your customers are. When writing a thesis, the customers you want to satisfy are your potential readers.

Who are your potential readers? On this issue, many graduate students have stepped on the pit. I hope you can avoid it.

Your readers should not be the general public or even your classmates. Some graduate dissertations are written like textbooks. This is to set the readers as people who have no concept of a certain topic, or have a half knowledge of it, break it up and try to explain some basic terms and formulas to them. When you reply, you will often be criticized in a mess and feel wronged.

Your readers should not be your mentors. The long-standing inertia of composition training regards the tutor as a scholar. When writing a composition, your readers are probably your own Chinese teacher. As long as he looks pleasing to the eye, you can get high marks in your composition.

However, the role of the tutor should be your tutor, or even a collaborator of your thesis. Your readers should be "professionals" in this field. These people have received long-term academic training, so you don't need to give them popular science.

They are not your mentors. The tutor can communicate closely with you, so he can understand your thoughts, goals and difficulties, and can't express them in words. And these things, your potential readers are invisible. You must convince and impress them with your own paper.

Maybe you will think that the concept of "professional" is too vague and far away from you. Then you might as well imagine that other teachers in the whole department, as a whole, are your readers.

Cognitive differences

After defining the reader, let's look at how the paper meets the needs of readers.

I have always used every opportunity to emphasize to students that the most important thing in writing a paper is not the format, charts, data, or even those dazzling mathematical formulas ... the measure of the value of a paper is the cognitive difference.

What is cognitive difference? Before and after reading your paper, readers need to change their understanding of the issues you want to discuss, so that your paper can be considered useful. This change is cognitive difference. It can be an addition, deletion or modification of the reader's original cognition.

Let's talk about increase first. If readers don't understand the changes in the working environment, it will affect the productivity of the workshop. Then someone did an experiment to see the productivity of workers with different lighting conditions. The results show that improving lighting conditions can improve workers' labor efficiency. This is a supplement and increase to readers' original cognition, so there is a cognitive gap.

Then delete. After others did the above experiments, they were published in journals and sought after by readers. At one time, almost all factories chose to improve the lighting brightness in order to improve the production efficiency of workers. But if you think about it, it doesn't seem like this. So you also designed an experiment. By comparison, you find that the labor efficiency of workers has not changed synchronously after increasing the illumination first and then decreasing it. So you also sent an article about your experimental results. Your evidence is conclusive and your argument is clear, so readers who originally thought that "light intensity affects labor efficiency" deleted this connection from their minds.

Finally, I said modify. If you not only find that light is not the decisive factor affecting labor efficiency, but also properly point out that the social network in which workers live is the key factor to change labor efficiency in the experimental scene, and verify your hypothesis, then you are correcting readers' cognition.

If you can't do the above three functions. Then your paper will not change the cognitive structure of readers.

In other words, it makes no difference whether you write or not. You read a lot of papers, which are very decent, informative, complete in statistics and charts, and clear in logic ... However, reviewers often only ask the results:

So what?

Translated into Chinese, it means:

So what?

And then what? Reject the manuscript directly

An article, no matter how perfect it is, is meaningless if it has no influence on readers' cognition. Doing research and writing papers costs money, and meaningless topics should naturally not be passed.

confirm

After understanding the concept of cognitive difference, let's see how to apply it.

When you choose a topic, you need to verify it. When verifying, you actually need to ask yourself two questions:

Will your topic cause poor readers' cognition?

Are readers interested in your topic?

Look at the first question first. Note that whether there is a cognitive gap is rejected by one vote. If your topic is not cognitively bad for any reader, it means that your paper is not cognitively bad for readers.

You may say that although Mr. Zhang knows everything I want to write, Mr. Li doesn't do it, so he doesn't understand. Then, can I write a paper for Mr. Li, who is also a professional?

No This is because scientific knowledge is distributed. There is too much knowledge for any scholar's mind to fully adapt. The person (gatekeeper) who really has the ability to evaluate whether the topic of your thesis is meaningful should be Mr. Zhang who has devoted himself to this topic, not Mr. Li who has studied other issues.

You might say:

Please, I don't know all the scholars. How can I know what everyone thinks?

Of course you can. Because so far, all published research records are in the literature database. If no one has really put forward a certain point of view in the literature you can retrieve.