Challenges and Support in Writing for a Professional Postgraduate Degree: Students’ Perspectives

This paper explores the perceptions of students reading for Industrial Masters and Industrial Doctorate degrees regarding how practice-based research differs from academic research, the writing challenges they faced and strategies they adopted to overcome them, and their evaluation of their improvement in writing. These work-study students were working on research projects determined by their companies, in collaboration with the university. The students were enrolled in a 12-week mandatory pass/fail no credit Technical Writing and Communication module. Data was collected via students’ submissions in the LMS and an end-of-module online survey with the writing faculty taking on the role of participant-observer. The findings show that most students were not aware about the differences between practice-based research which is more succinct and template-based, and academic research which involves critique of literature. Furthermore, students mainly faced challenges in situating their problem statement in the context of past literature and determining the level of detail and appropriate methods to explain and justify their data collection and analysis procedures. Through self-analysis of journal articles, feedback from the writing faculty and a desire to make their writing relevant to their work, students learned what qualified as ‘academic’ in research-based writing and found their voice and identity as practitioner-researchers. This epistemological shift from practitioner to practitioner-researcher, however, could be seen more clearly only in the last two weeks of the trimester. Referencing more journal articles and consultations with the faculty often highlighted that academic writing, though succinct, required literaturesupported substantiation. The lack of a template to guide their writing might have hindered students’ ability to write coherently earlier in the writing process. The students were submitting their drafts for the introduction, literature review and methodology sections in separate documents rather than developing their ideas in the same document. The findings in this study reflect that it is important to clarify early to the students what qualifies as ‘academic’. Furthermore, faculty could impress on students that the skills of questioning claims and evidence-based substantiation are valuable transferable skills to enhance the relevance of the professional doctorate to their work, industry and themselves.