Supervisors' Experience and Area of Specialization as Determinats of the Quality of Students' Project Report Writing Skills in Tertiary Institutions

Abstract

Project report writing is important and compulsory for every final year student in tertiary institutions, however adequate attention has not been given to the supervision of project report writing. Some teething problems always accompany project report writing. This expo-facto study therefore seeks to investigate the effects of supervisors’ experience and area of specialization on the quality of students’ project report writing skills. The population for the study comprised all the 60 supervisors in the school of science, out of which 42 were sampled. One research question and three hypotheses were formulated for this study. The main hypotheses raised were: the quality of students’ project report is not significantly affected by Supervisors Experience and the quality of students’ project report is not significantly affected by Supervisors Area of specialization. The results show that there was significant main effect of supervisors’ experience on the quality of students’ project report and also there was significant main effect of supervisors’ area of specialization on the quality of students’ project report. As a result of these findings, it was recommended that there should be a format for project writing, research report requirements/ guidelines should be part of students’ handbook and mentoring should be encouraged in project supervision.