Abstract:
What education students need to know and be able to do prior to engaging in independent research is contested. This paper reports a Delphi study of registered supervisors in one faculty of education in a research intensive university in New Zealand. After one round of data collection from supervisors, they rated 212 expectations aggregated into ten themes. Highly valued expectations were in search, speaking, writing and thinking skills as well as self-regulation ability and supervisor characteristics. Forty expectations were identified by three administrators as being highly suited to teaching in a research methods course but the correlation to the value given by supervisors was close to zero. This study illustrates the challenges facing the preparation of students for independent research in the face of methodological diversity.