Supervisors' perspective on medical thesis projects and dropout rates: survey among thesis supervisors at a large German university hospital

Abstract

ObjectivesTo identify underlying causes for failure of medical thesis projects and the constantly high drop-out rate in Germany from the supervisors' perspective and to compare the results with the students' perspective.SettingCross-sectional survey. Online questionnaire for survey of medical thesis supervisors among the staff of Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany. Published, earlier longitudinal survey among students for comparison.Participants1069 thesis supervisors participated.Data extraction and synthesisData are presented using descriptive statistics, and the χ2 test served to compare the results among supervisors with the earlier data from the longitudinal survey of doctoral students.Primary and secondary outcomesNot applicable. This survey is an observational study.ResultsOf 3653 potential participants, 1069 (29.3%) supervising 3744 doctoral candidates participated in the study. Supervisors considered themselves to be highly motivated and to offer adequate supervision. On the other hand, 87% stated that they did not feel well prepared for thesis supervision. Supervisors gave lack of timeliness of doctoral students and personal differences (p=0.024 and p=0.001) as the main reasons for terminating thesis projects. Doctoral students predominantly mentioned methodological problems and difficult subjects as critical issues (p=0.001 and p<0.001). Specifically, students felt ill prepared for the statistical part of their research—49.5% stated that they never received statistical assistance, whereas 97% of supervisors claimed to help their students with statistical analysis.ConclusionsThe authors found that both thesis supervisors and medical students feel ill prepared for their roles in the process of a medical dissertation. Contradictory reasons for terminating medical thesis projects based on supervisors' and students' self-assessment suggest a lack of communication and true scientific collaboration between supervisors and doctoral students as the major underlying issue that requires resolution.

The importance of scientific competencies in German medical curricula - the student perspective

“…Further research is needed to determine the amount of terminated projects and the reasons for this. This is seemingly being viewed rather diversely by students and supervisors [27]. …”

Identifying Factors for Master Thesis Completion and Non-completion Through Learning Analytics and Machine Learning

“…However, the review of the literature leads to the conclusion that there are few studies explicitly focusing on master thesis projects. Studies on completion of thesis projects mostly concern the doctorate thesis [16,17] while studies on master thesis completion tend to focus on the whole program, not the thesis specifically [18][19][20]. Furthermore, most studies have used a qualitative approach to investigate factors for thesis completion; single factors have been looked at in an isolated way with a primary focus on student variables and on completion factors (and not on non-completion and supervisor variables) [21][22][23].…”

<p>What factors affect the quality of medical students’ doctoral theses? A comparative study in affiliated hospitals of a Chinese university</p>

“…It seems that one common deficiency in methodological training for medical students is statistics. Earlier studies on German medical doctor candidates showed that more than half of the students need more assistance with statistics 9. A measure of attitudes found that medical students were not very active in their study of statistics 10.…”