Browsing by Subject "maisterintutkielma"

Objective of the study. Previous studies have shown that university graduates learn various generic skills during their studies. Despite this graduates experience that they have not learned enough of these skills. Moreover, not all graduates can describe or evaluate if they have learned generic skills during their university studies. The majority of previous studies have focused on generalist students' generic skill development. Therefore, the objective of this study is to produce new information regarding the perceptions of learning generic skills of professional field graduates during their university studies. The second objective of this study is to examine the relation between learned generic skills and academic success by observing master’s thesis grades. Previous studies have shown that generic skills are needed but also learned during the master’s thesis process. Despite this, the relation between generic skills and master’s thesis grades has remained unclear. Methods. The qualitative and quantitative data of this study were collected originally as a part of a wider study concerning generic skills (Tuononen, 2019). The data of this study consist of the answers to the HowULearn -survey and interviews. This study includes the survey answers of 138 professional field graduates and eight participants also took part in the interview. The mixed-method design was used in this study and the data was analysed with qualitative and quantitative methods. The interview data was analyzed with abductive content analysis. The survey data was analyzed with statistical tests by using SPSS Statistics. Results and conclusions. This study showed that the graduates of the professional fields learned well various generic skills. The graduates experienced they have especially learned skills related to academic knowledge creation and academic thinking such as analysing and structuring information, looking at things from another perspective and critical thinking. The university studies were experienced to develop less cooperation and communication skills and innovation skills. The study also showed that from measured skills only the skill of analysing and structuring information was statistically related to a master’s thesis grade. The results of this study address that the relation between generic skills and a master’s thesis is still not clear, although the generic skills are needed during the master’s thesis process. In the future, there should be more critical research about the master’s thesis as an indicator of academic success. More studies are needed about how universities could teach better generic skills, which students feel that they have learned the weakest during their studies.