Your Education Masters Companion

The essential guide to success

Jim McGrath, Anthony Coles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317505006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Your Education Masters Companion will help you choose the right Masters Course for your needs and provides the essential information you need to pass first time. Offering guidance based on years of experience working with a range of Masters level students, it unpacks the defining characteristic of successful Masters level work, and explores key aspects of undertaking your course - reading, writing, producing a literature review, research methodologies, data collection tools, research reports, dissertations and presentations.

What this book will do for you:

• Increase your self-confidence
• Identify the major traps you must avoid if you are to pass your masters.
• Introduce you to the concepts of Masters Level work, what's expected of you and what you can expect from your tutors and supervisors.
• Provide you with guidance on the essential thinking and writing skills that you will need to develop
• Provide guidance on what opportunities are available to you on completion of your masters.

Your Education Masters Companion is an essential read for any individual thinking about or currently studying for a Masters Level qualification in education.

1 Pass your Masters first time

Ten mistakes to avoid

1.1 Introduction

1.2 The top ten mistakes to avoid

1.3 Conclusion

Further reading

Aim of chapter: To help you avoid the most common mistakes made by Masters students.

Chapter overview: This chapter outlines ten common mistakes that students make at Masters level. These include failing to use a critical friend, discussing ideas and theories without fully understanding them, lack of self-confidence, and the failure to read widely and take on board feedback provided by markers. Eliminate these errors and your marks will increase substantially.

1.1 Introduction

It may seem odd to start a book on how to gain a Masters-level qualification in education by discussing the mistakes made by students. But it has been situated here for two reasons:

• It will help dispel some of the fears that you may have about studying at Masters level.

• It identifies many of the bear traps that students fall into during their studies and offers some easy ways to avoid them.

Key point: Avoid the errors listed below and you will be well on the way to passing your Masters.

As you read this list you may think, ‘Well, that’s obvious’, which will be a great reaction. Because if you can avoid the errors listed you’ll be a long way towards obtaining your Masters. But alas, the problems listed have time after time tripped up even the best students. For example, one excellent student somehow managed to submit an early draft of her dissertation rather than the finished article. Her tutor could only mark what was in front of her and a student who was on track to achieve a Distinction only achieved a bare pass. All because she didn’t do a final read-through of her work. An extreme example? Yes. But….

The chapter is shorter than many in the book. This is intentional, as many of the issues discussed will be revisited in later chapters.

1.2 The top ten mistakes to avoid

In ascending order of importance, the following are the ten most common mistakes that you should try to avoid.

Starting your assignment too early. This may seem counter-intuitive. For years you have been told by your teachers and lecturers to start your assignments early and to take your time with them. That’s not bad advice when you are given the question or topic to write about. But at Masters level you are often required to identify and agree on an assignment title with your tutor/supervisor. Choosing your own title/topic causes many students problems. They are not used to it and are unsure of what an appropriate question or topic would look like. There is also the problem that until you have covered, say, 70 per cent of a module, you are in no position to decide what issues interest you the most or would make the best assignment. So don’t be in a rush to start writing. Choose your title when you have completed about three-quarters of the module. As the deadline for submission is probably four or six weeks after the end of the module, this will give you more than enough time to produce your best work.

Delay writing your assignment until the last moment. There are many students who will do anything to avoid starting to write their assignment. They continue to read and take copious notes until their eyes bleed. They plan in precise detail each element of their assignment and make endless cups of tea/coffee and tidy their desk/room until they are working in a dust- and germ-free environment that would be a credit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Anything to avoid starting to write.

You’ll know if you suffer from procrastination so use one or both of the following tips to overcome it. First, set a deadline for when you will start writing. When the deadline arrives, sit down and start writing. No excuses. Put your bum on the seat and start writing. Unless you sit down and turn on the computer, you will never write anything. If you find that you can’t write, just sit there. Do not get up. Do not do anything else. I think you’ll find that within 30 minutes the words will start to flow.

As a general rule of thumb I think you’ll need about 20 hours of solid work to write a good 5,000-word assignment. That’s about three days’ work, but it excludes all the reading, note-taking and research that you may have carried out prior to writing. A 10,000-word assignment may take 45 hours, and a dissertation of more than 20,000 words will take between 75 and 100 hours, or about three weeks of hard work.

Second, remember you don’t have to write your assignment in any particular order. Yes, you’ll have to present the final effort in specific order, e.g. abstract, introduction, literature review, research methodology, findings and analysis and conclusions. But you can start anywhere you like. So if you’ve got great notes from your reading, write the literature review first. If you are fascinated by research methodologies (as a few of us are) start with your research methodology section.

Remember, even professional writers suffer from procrastination, only it’s usually multiplied by a factor of ten. Other work and a week in Cornwall have kept me away from writing this book for three weeks. To get back into it I decided to write this section rather than pick up where I had previously left off. Why? Because this area is one that I know students find useful and I’m fascinated by the barriers that stop students achieving. (At the time of writing this I am not at all sure where this chapter will appear in the book. I hope it will appear at the start, but all I can say for certain is that it will appear somewhere.)

Failure to use either a critical friend and/or the university’s academic support team (AST). We all have blind spots. Habits that we are unaware of. Such habits extend to our writing and academic work. Mine used to be an utter indifference to apostrophes.

No matter how strong you are academically, there is always the danger that you will fail to recognise some of the weaknesses in your work. All students should find someone on the course that they respect and get on with and agree to act as each other’s critical friend.

Those students who are worried about their use of English should also contact the university’s AST. The support team are generalists, which means that they won’t be able to comment on the content of your work, but they will be able to identify grammatical, structural and stylistic problems and offer advice on how to remedy them and improve the clarity and impact of your work.

Failure to carry out a final edit and polish of your assignment before submission. To help you identify errors ‘complete’ your assignment seven to ten days before the submission deadline. Then put it in a drawer for five days and forget about it. This will give you some much needed distance from the work. Then take it out and read it aloud. This will slow you down and help you read what is actually on the page rather than what you think is/should be there. This process will enable you to identify both the good and bad bits of your assignment. The bad bits you can amend and the good you can enhance further. A final edit like this can help you avoid howlers like: ‘I maintained the animosity between all of the research participants’. What the student meant to say was ‘I maintained anonymity between the research participants’. Mind you, lecturers do enjoy gaffs like this as it enlivens a long batch of marking.

Failing to understand what good Masters-level writing is all about. Talk about doing a Masters and it conjures up in people’s minds the picture of bright, academically gifted students working away on difficult problems in some dusty library or laboratory. Such ideas mean that many students secretly worry that they won’t be able to reach the standard required. To compensate, they try to write in what they think is an academic manner and litter their work with big words, jargon and fancy phrasing. The result is that their work lacks clarity and is nearly impossible to read or understand. (Unfortunately there are also some academics who mistakenly believe that writing unintelligible prose is a sign of profundity.)

Clarity is more important than style. Let me say that again. CLARITY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN STYLE. What you must aim for is clear, simple, sharp English that helps the reader to understand your arguments. If you have a choice between using a big word and a small one always choose the smaller option. Of course, there will be times when it is appropriate to use big words or jargon, as only a specific word or phrase will do the job, but seek to minimise them.

Remember: ‘Great art is the expression of complex ideas in a simple form’ (Albert Einstein). At Masters level you have to express complex ideas in a clear and simple way. Don’t try to be clever.

Linked to the problem of big words is using words or phrases that you don’t fully understand. Don’t advertise how desperate you are to impress by using words, phrases and jargon that you don’t fully understand. It smacks of the young child trying to join in with the big kids and getting the language all wrong or lecturers trying to talk to students using what they think is the latest slang.

Never discuss an idea or theory that you don’t fully understand. Unless you fully understand an idea you can’t write convincingly about it and your lack of understanding will quickly become apparent to your reader. Such an ‘error’ advertises your weaknesses and undermines your credibility. This affects how your tutor reads the rest of your assignment and colours their thinking about your work. So avoid it.

Not reading widely enough. When you start to study a module at Masters level you may or may not know what your assignment will be about. But you can’t leave your reading until you decide. You need to adopt a two-stage reading strategy.

In Stage One you start reading immediately. You do this to gain the depth of knowledge required to produce a good assignment. Using any references your lecturer gives you in the sessions and the recommended reading list for the course, follow up the topics discussed in each session. At this stage don’t worry about taking too many notes – just read to increase your general understanding of the subject.

When you have identified a title or topic for your assignment you enter Stage Two. It is now that you revisit those books and articles that you previously read which are relevant to your work and undertake a proper literature search to find material that deals specifically with the issues you wish to explore. It is at this point that you start to take detailed notes and build up your theoretical framework (see Chapter 5).

It is the literature that you access in Stage Two that you use in your assignment. Why then, you might ask, is Stage One rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of handouts
• About the authors
• Introduction: how to get the most out of this book
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Pass your Masters first time: ten mistakes to avoid
• 2 What’s involved in doing a Masters
• 3 Becoming a Masters student
• 4 Writing at Masters level
• 5 Researching and writing a literature review
• 6 Your research methodology
• 7 Data collection tools: interviews, observations and questionnaires
• 8 How to structure a research report, dissertation or journal article
• 9 Presentations and written assignments
• 10 Where next?
• Glossary of terms
• References
• Index