Thesis Advisers Research Articles

Exploring Self-efficacy, Research, and Teaching Skills among Undergraduate Thesis Advisers

Research is now an active part of the academe. This descriptive-correlational study utilizing the purposive sampling technique was conducted to determine the level and relationships of self-efficacy, teaching skills, and research skills among the undergraduate thesis advisers of NIPSC-BVC. Using Hoy and Woolfolk’s (1993) Teacher Efficacy Scale and Research Skills and Teaching Skills Assessment Instruments, data were collected. Mean, ANOVA, Pearson’s r, and t-test were used in the analysis of data. Results revealed that the general teaching efficacy of the respondents is good while personal teaching efficacy is very good. The level of teaching skills of respondents’ ages 40-49 and 11-20 years of teaching experience is excellent, while respondents’ aged 20-39, 50 and above, with 0-10 and 21 or more years in service, possess the strong ability. Results also showed that agriculture thesis advisers have strong teaching skills while education respondents are excellent. A significant correlation was observed between respondents’ general teaching efficacy and teaching skills, research and teaching skills, and general teaching efficacy and research skills. The respondents’ level of general teaching efficacy, when grouped according to age and teaching skills according to the department, showed a significant difference. Based on the results of the study, instructional and research capability-building activities that enhance the respondents’ self-efficacy, research skills, and teaching skills were proposed and conducted.

Scaffolding Strategies in Academic Writing Employed by Thesis Advisers in the Graduate School

Instructional scaffolding is recognized as a vital component in advanced academic writing in higher education institutions. In particular, this paper described the task- enabling support provided by the graduate school of Bukidnon State University to ensure quality research outputs. Results of the study showed that thesis advisers provide an engaging research environment characterized by a high level of challenge and support; that scaffolding strategies are diverse in terms of mode, manner and means; that the effectiveness of these scaffolding strategies is perceived based on the advisees’ writing needs; and that the progression of scaffolding varies depending on the advisees’ abilities.

INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH AGENDA EXECUTION THROUGH UNDERGRADUATE THESIS OUTPUT

As the universities in the Philippines aspires to be among the leading institutions within ASEAN together with other ASEAN universities, research initiatives have been one of the way for them to internationalize. Research agenda were created to align all the efforts of the higher education institution towards few, if not one, foci. This paper is a formative evaluation of the initial execution of a certain autonomous university in the country. Utilization of the research agenda as well as the research capability of the advisers is looked into in this paper. The 10-fold agenda, sixty eight (68) theses and thirty (30) faculty members, twenty (20) of which are thesis advisers, are used as data for the document analysis. Slovin’s formula is shown to set the minimum required number of data needed. The census of the population is gathered. Descriptive statistics, such as frequency and percentage, are employed since the research is qualitative in nature. Among the 68 theses analyzed, 6 are classified as Type A, 18 are Type B, and the rest are Type C. Scoring is based on the panel or paper critique done at the end of the semester. The bias is reduced through a ranking of score, instead of using the weighted mean to eliminate sensitivity to extreme values. In its entirety, this research is valuable to the institution as its results could be used to improve the current system of the institution and further strengthen its research culture. At the end of this paper, a model is proposed to aid the other institution in formulating its own research agenda through internal and external assessment – Tri-Focal Assessment for Research Agenda Creation (TARAC).

Quality of Thesis Advising in Graduate Education in Northern Mindanao

The quality of thesis advising plays a crucial role in the success of graduate students writing their research paper. However, an evaluation of the quality of thesis advising is not undertaken in the graduate schools; hence, this study was conducted to assess how the thesis advisers in the graduate schools in Northern Mindanao perform along the time, affective, technical, and professional domains of thesis advising as rated by their advisees. A pre-tested evaluation tool, which was distributed to the thesis advisees through the deans of the graduate schools, was used. The data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings reveal that the thesis advisers in the graduate schools obtained very good evaluation ratings along the four domains of advising. When grouped by type of school, either public or private, the advisers did not significantly differ in their evaluation ratings. The findings indicate high quality thesis advising in the graduate schools in Northern Mindanao; that is, the thesis advisers have imbibed in their advising standard and ethical values. Keywords : Graduate education, thesis advising, thesis mentoring, advising evaluation, graduate thesis advising, survey, Philippines

Online Technologies and Knowledge Production in the Natural Sciences

Epistemic communities consist of structures and selectivities in citation and referencing that scientists as practical and economic reasoners use in order to establish scientific credit and capital in their specialized field. Knowledge then becomes a product of social and economic shaping based on selectivities, or decision-making processes in the epistemic community. This paper looks at the use of online resources (i.e., journal databases) in the natural sciences programs (i.e., physics, chemistry, and biology) of two Philippine universities, through key informant interviews with graduating students, thesis advisers, and library personnel. In this context, scientific credit and capital are gained by researchers from the credibility of the resources that they use (i.e., authors and research institutions cited in their thesis), although this is limited by the availability of resources in the universities. The availability of online materials is associated with functional meanings such as convenience. Meanwhile, the substantive meanings of the availability of online resources show the dilemma of universities in balancing costs and research independence, since findings show that the online usage in both universities is insufficient to maximize the costs spent in purchasing the online resources. The first university values knowledge production more than cost-efficiency in the acquisition of references, thus, the structure of knowledge production is more accommodating to the selectivities of its researchers. In contrast, it is seen that the structure of knowledge production in the second university regard costs as more important. This causes its researchers to use non-online materials.

Giuseppe Franco Bassani

Giuseppe Franco Bassani, a cofounder of the modern Italian school of condensed-matter theory, died in Pisa on 25 September 2008 after a long and tenacious fight against cancer. Born on 29 October 1929 in Milan, Franco studied at the University of Pavia, with Piero Caldirola and Fausto Fumi as his thesis advisers. After finishing his laurea thesis, “The energy levels of the F-center,” in 1952, Franco went to the US to work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he collaborated with Frederick Seitz and considered himself Seitz’s student.Franco returned to Italy in 1956 to take a position as an assistant professor, first at the University of Palermo and then at Pavia University. In 1960 he moved to Chicago to work at Argonne National Laboratory as a research associate. His research during that time was instrumental in the formulation of the modern electronic theory of solids based on pseudopotentials and in the analysis of the connections between electronic structure and optical properties, particularly of semiconductors. That work was described by David Brust, James Phillips, and Franco in a 1962 article published in Physical Review Letters (volume 9, page 94). His book Electronic States and Optical Transitions in Solids (Pergamon Press, 1975), written with his student Giuseppe Pastori Parravicini, inspired at least two generations of theorists worldwide who were working in that field. (A Russian translation was published in the Soviet Union without any royalties paid to the authors!) The book made extensive use of group theory a subject that Franco mastered, beginning with an advanced course he took in 1955 under Seitz at Illinois.In 1963 Franco returned to Italy and took a job as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Messina. He moved to the University of Pisa in 1966 and then went to the University of Rome, where he held the chair of solid-state physics from 1969 to 1980. But the vagaries of student politics in Italy’s capital were too much for Franco’s conservative spirit. After spending 1979 as a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois, Franco returned to Pisa in 1980, where he had been offered the chair of solid-state physics at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore. He later served as the director of the Scuola Normale from 1995 to 1999.In addition to teaching students and encouraging them to engage in vigorous research, Franco carried out his own studies and organized lively condensed-matter physics groups. He extended his research interests to the theory of excitons, the theory of nonlinear optical properties, and the electronic structure and optical properties of layered compounds, including organic-inorganic heterojunctions. In studying the electron-lattice interactions at F-centers, he revisited the subject of his 1952 thesis.Franco steadfastly supported Italian and European physics in all its manifestations. He was a member of Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and he served as chairman of the European Physical Society’s condensed-matter division from 1986 to 1992 and as president of the Italian Physical Society from 1999 to 2007. Franco received numerous recognitions and awards, including the 1979 Somaini Prize of the Italian Physical Society, the 1996 Italgas Prize for technology and science of materials, and the Italian Presidential Gold Medal for Science and Culture for 2000.Besides his contributions to science, Franco was a cultivated man with a love for history that rivaled that of professional historians. One morning while driving along the Muro Torto, part of Rome’s Aurelian Walls, he realized that a small statue, usually encased in the wall, was missing and called the superintendent to the monuments of Rome. After a lengthy and in-depth discussion with the superintendent, who at first thought he was talking to the well-known writer Giorgio Bassani, Franco learned that the statue had been removed for restoration.Many of Franco’s friends remember him stopping his car in the middle of traffic to point out some antiquities and explain their history. Other drivers would furiously blow their horns, but their reactions did not seem to deter him from his mission.Franco also was well regarded for his expertise and appreciation of wine. With his brother Giancarlo, he produced excellent wines from a vineyard on his family estate. Once Franco acted as the “defender of red wine” in a fictitious trial in which he brilliantly illustrated the wine’s almost miraculous and therapeutic virtues.An exceedingly warm and gentle human being, Franco was beloved by his many students and was well respected as a teacher, mentor, and colleague. He was a man of exceptional vigor and principles. His personality, humor, and many interests are reflected in numerous other enjoyable anecdotes that make the rounds among his friends, colleagues, and students. They and the physics community will dearly miss him.Giuseppe Franco BassaniPPT|High resolution© 2009 American Institute of Physics.

Robert Simha

Robert Simha, a groundbreaking polymer physicist and emeritus professor of macromolecular science and engineering at Case Western Reserve University, passed away peacefully on 5 June 2008 at his residence in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.Born in Vienna on 4 August 1912, Robert began his studies at the Polytechnic School in 1930 and transferred to the University of Vienna in 1931. Under thesis advisers Hans Thirring and Felix Ehrenhaft, he graduated with a PhD degree in theoretical physics in 1935. Robert chose his thesis topic, colloid hydrodynamics, in part from his discussions with Eugene Guth, a theoretical physicist. Guth was working with a dynamic interdisciplinary group directed by Herman Mark, which was studying the properties of polymers. Robert had the challenge of extending Albert Einstein’s viscosity theory of rigid spheres to higher concentrations and to ellipsoidal and flexible solutes. Thus began an influential line of inquiry in which he published extensively until 1981. In that field he collaborated with Samuel Weissberg, Jacques Zakin, and one of us (Utracki).In 1938 Robert obtained a postdoctoral position with and fellowship through Victor Kuhn LaMer at Columbia University. There he initiated groundbreaking research with Elliott Montroll on a kinetic theory of chain degradation processes. In 1942 Robert took a faculty position at Howard University and began a third seminal research direction, with Herman Branson, on the kinetics and statistics of copolymerization chain reactions. Next he moved to the National Bureau of Standards in 1945, where he and Leo Wall developed a theory of depolymerization, which was experimentally confirmed by Samuel Madorsky. The theory accounted for behaviors varying from random scission to unzipping with high monomer recovery. In 1951 Robert went to New York University’s department of chemical engineering, where he indulged a long-standing interest in statistical thermodynamics. With student Stuart Hadden, he used the cell theory of Ilya Prigogine to derive the equations of state of linear and branched paraffins. The paraffin work became the starting point for major explorations into the configurational thermodynamics of macromolecules and small molecules. Also, with Harry Frisch and Fritz Eirich, Robert developed a theory of adsorption of long chains from solution.Robert went on to the University of Southern California in 1958. There he and Ray Boyer worked on the equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of polymer glasses and melts; that work resulted in widely used correlations between the glass transition temperature and thermal expansivity. Robert’s most notable achievement, however, was with Thomas Somcynsky: They derived the cell–hole theory of chain molecule liquids, which correctly characterizes the temperature and pressure effects on specific volume (the PVT behavior) and on the lattice vacancy fraction—that is, the free-volume content.In 1968 Robert took a position at Case. With Alexander Silberberg and student Robert Lacombe, he studied the kinetics of cooperative processes in synthetic and biological macromolecular structures. Anh Quach was the first to show quantitative agreement with the cell–hole theory when he built a pressure dilatometer and carefully measured PVT behavior in two polymers—melt and glass. In his ongoing research on the theory, Robert worked with many international scientists. For example, he collaborated with Raj Jain (India) in successfully applying the theory to multicomponent systems. With Hankun Xie (China) and Chul Park (Canada), he extended it to gas solubility. Scientists worldwide were able to extend the cell–hole theory to more than 50 polymers. Using the computed hole fraction, Robert developed an approach to determining nonequilibrium properties. In collaboration with John McKinney, he demonstrated the partial freeze-in of free volume at the glass transition temperature. With Utracki, he investigated the correlation between the hole fraction and viscous flow, and with John Curro and Richard Robertson, Robert explored the kinetics of volume relaxation. He did research with Gianni Consolati, Franz Maurer, John McGervey, and one of us (Jamieson) on the relationships between hole fraction and positronium annihilation lifetime spectroscopy. Working with Elisabeth Papazoglou, he developed a theory of elastic constants of polymer glasses that incorporated the stress dependence of free volume.Robert’s achievements were recognized in 1973 by the Society of Rheology, which awarded him the Bingham Medal. The American Physical Society presented him with the Polymer Physics Prize in 1981.Throughout his professorial career, until he retired in 1983, Robert was a gifted and highly popular teacher. Scientific discussions with him were enlivened by his droll sense of humor and encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, which was forever playing on an antique radio in his office. We will miss his sharp wit and poignant insights.Robert SimhaPPT|High resolution© 2008 American Institute of Physics.

Graduate Education in Chemical Biology at the University of Michigan

A round the country, chemical biology is increasingly recognized as a focal point for understanding biology at the molecular level—where modern biological andbiomedical research is pursued from a uniquely chemical perspective. Research in chemical biology has been conducted at the University of Michigan for many years in several departments, including biological chemistry, biophysics, chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology. Historically, no single programprovided large numbers of faculty working in this area. Moreover, graduate training in chemical biology within individual departments often forced students to conform to existing departmental guidelines that may not have been appropriate for them. This meant that in some cases it was difficult for students to get the training they needed. In response to the need for specific graduate education in chemical biology, a new interdepartmental doctoral program was initiated in 2004. The program is essentially a virtual department and leads to a Ph.D. in chemical biology. Alternative models, in which students apply to an umbrella recruiting program that allows them to select from several departments to do their Ph.D. work after they matriculate, are used by several institutions (including Michigan for the biomedical sciences). Although such a model opened the door for more thesis advisers for students to choose from, we selected the virtual department to ensure that students in the program receive a high-level, cohesive graduate experience; that the program would have full control over the graduate curriculum; and that a level of research collaboration and mentorship is enabled that is not possible in existing departments. Our program faculty (now 40) is drawn from seven departments across campus. Students entering the Michigan chemical biology doctoral program are free to choose any of these faculty or groups of faculty as thesis mentors, and this allows them access to most laboratories on campus that do chemical biology research. Our faculty members have a diverse group of interests covering nearly all areas of what can be described as chemical biology. A major challenge in designing our program is that “chemical biology” means different things to different people. Thus, entering students have varying backgrounds and diverse interests. Rather than trying to impose a specific vision of what chemical biology should be, we have taken a very openattitude. The chemical biologydoctoral program at Michigan is structured to maximize the flexibility a student has in designing his or her curriculum and to place the key decision points in the hands of the students. A sequence of two core courses is required; a minimal list of topics is covered that we believe every chemical biologist *Corresponding author, gglick@umich.edu.

AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY FISCHER

This interview was completed in May 2004, well before Stan Fischer had any idea he would become Governor of the Bank of Israel, a position he took up in May 2005. The interview took place in April 2004 in my office at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, where I was spending a sabbatical year. We completed it while running together in Central Park during the following weeks.Our meeting at Russell Sage was just like the many meetings we have had over the years. I was not sitting with a Master of the Universe, a world VIP, but with the same Stan Fischer I had first met in 1973 when he was a young associate professor, freshly imported from Chicago. There was the same ability to listen carefully, the same ability to talk and to explain simply and straightforwardly. In addition, there was the accumulated wisdom of a professional life spent developing and applying macroeconomics to the very real world.When I arrived as a PhD student at MIT in 1973, it was clear that Stan would quickly play a central role in the department. Within a few years, he was one of the most popular teachers, and one of the most popular thesis advisers. We flocked to his office, and I suspect that the only time for research he had was during the night. What we admired most were his technical skills (he knew how to use stochastic calculus)—, and his ability to take on big questions and to simplify them to the point where the answer, ex post, looked obvious. When Rudi Dornbusch joined him in 1975, macro and international quickly became the most exciting fields at MIT. Imitation is the sincerest form of admiration, and this is very much what we all did.When I came back to MIT in 1982, this time as a faculty member, Stan had acquired near-guru status. Teaching the advanced macro courses with him, and writing “Lectures on Macroeconomics,” which we finished in 1988, was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life. We both felt that there was a new macroeconomics, more micro-founded and full of promises and that we understood its architecture and its usefulness. Although we had not thought of it as a textbook, it quickly became one, and it is nice to know that it still sells surprisingly well today.As the years had passed, Stan had taken more and more interest in applying theory to the real world, working with Rudi on hyperinflation, being involved in the economics of peace with George Shultz in the Middle East. In 1988, he decided to jump from academia to the real world, and became Chief Economist of the World Bank. After a brief return to MIT, he then returned to Washington in 1994 to become First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, where he remained until 2001. That part of his life has been well documented in newspapers and magazines: While at the IMF, he was on the front lines during the Mexican crisis, the Russian crisis, the Asian crises, and many others. From the peeks I got of him during those times, what strikes me most is how he remained the same as he had been at MIT: calm, careful about the facts, analytical, using macroeconomic theory even in the middle of the most intense fires. Many thought and hoped that he would become the managing director of the IMF. Antiquated rules and country politics prevented it from happening. The IMF's loss turned out to be the private sector's gain. In 2002, Stan joined Citigroup, where he is the President of Citigroup International. He is still active in macro policy debates and remains one of the wise men of our profession.

Prabahan Kemal Kabir

Prabahan Kemal Kabir, a well-known theoretical physicist and retired professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, died on 29 August 2004 near Berhampur, India, while swimming in the sea. He was an authority on charge conjugation–parity (CP) and time-reversal invariance (T) violation.Born in Calcutta, India, on 30 June 1933, Kabir was known to his family and friends as “Pasha.” His family was prominent in Indian politics: His father was the minister of education in the Nehru government. Kabir finished his undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Delhi at the age of 18 and spent two more years there on his MSc in physics under Ramesh Chandra Majumdar. Kabir came to the US to pursue his doctorate in theoretical physics at Cornell University, where his thesis advisers were Hans Bethe and Edwin Salpeter. His thesis work on the Lamb shift in helium, coauthored by Salpeter, is still widely quoted.Kabir completed his PhD in 1957 and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, followed by a year in the UK at the University of Birmingham with Rudolf Peierls, who was his mentor. Kabir left Birmingham for the University of Calcutta, where he briefly taught nuclear physics before joining the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a research physicist and assistant professor of physics. He moved next to CERN, where he was a visiting scientist from 1963 to 1965, until he took a position as a principal scientific officer at the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory in the UK. He spent six years at Rutherford before returning to the US as a professor at the University of Virginia, his base for the remainder of his career while he still traveled extensively to Europe and India. He remained in Charlottesville following his retirement from the university in May 1998.Kabir’s most important work was on symmetry and symmetry violation. He formulated a description of T violation in the kaon system that does not assume CPT invariance. He realized that for T violation, detailed balance has to be broken, so in 1970, he introduced what became known as the Kabir parameter to quantify the imbalance. It would be another 30 years before that parameter was itself measured.An important idea in field theory was introduced in 1959, thanks to Kabir, Gerald Feinberg, and Steven Weinberg. Their theorem was the first example of the cancellation of a flavor-changing neutral current from muon to electron.Kabir suggested other new ideas that, like his T violation parameter, may take decades to be observed experimentally. He did not publish many of his ideas because he chose to help others tackle them. Not a follower of trends, Kabir concentrated on symmetries. He was fiercely independent and refused to accept new ideas if he found them at variance with his intuition. For example, he remained skeptical that the graviton would reach a limiting mass of zero discontinuously, as noted by Martinus J. G. Veltman in his 1999 Nobel lecture. Kabir edited the textbook Development of Weak Interaction Theory (Gordon & Breach, 1963), which reprints and translates to English important contributions to the field up to that time, and wrote The CP Puzzle (Academic Press, 1968), a still much quoted, detailed account of the neutral kaon system. He was editor of Physics Letters B (1978–81) and was on the board of trustees of Universities Research Association Inc (1979–85). Between 1984 and 1990, he chaired the Kilambi Ramavataram Fund Committee of the American Physical Society. The fund supports undergraduate physics teachers from India on short visits to the US.An exceptional and wonderful person, Kabir was also a warm and generous friend and a stimulating and provocative companion. He is deeply missed by his many friends and collaborators throughout the world. Prabahan Kemal Kabir PPT|High resolution© 2005 American Institute of Physics.

Families with chronically ill children.

Debra D. Meleski is a pediatric nurse practitioner at Torrington-Winsted Pediatric Associates in Torrington and Winsted, CT. This article builds upon the author's master's-degree thesis; she acknowledges Margaret Grey, DrPH, CPNP, FAAN, and Lynne Schilling, PhD, RN, of the Yale University School of Nursing, her thesis advisers. Contact author: [email protected].

The statistically simple study: a guide for thesis advisers.

The statistically simple study: a guide for thesis advisers.