Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation (review)

Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation offers a sound argument for helping doctoral students achieve high performance levels in the research and writing of their dissertation by providing clear and explicit performance expectations. Barbara Lovitts discusses the importance of explicit performance standards from a student advocacy standpoint, explaining the need to demystify the dissertation process and the need for reform in doctoral education. She makes a critical point in suggesting that the dissertation should be used as an outcome measure for assessing the strength of graduate programs.

The most important argument in this text suggests that the goal for making expectations explicit for producing quality dissertations is not to rate dissertations on a grading scale but to make performance standards clear to graduate students so that they (a) are not in the dark about what constitutes a sound, high-quality dissertation, (b) can learn to measure their own performance levels guided by rubrics, and (c) produce high-quality dissertations.

The author clearly states that providing doctoral students with explicit expectations should not replace the critical role of the advisor but should enhance the advising relationship between student and faculty member by providing a means for effective formative evaluation. This text is certainly one I wish I had had while writing my own dissertation. In addition to Lovitts's excellent rationales, she gives the reader detailed tables and rubrics that clearly outline the components and characteristics of different quality levels in dissertations.

This book is based on findings from Lovitts's 2003 study of nine doctoral-extensive research universities across 10 academic disciplines including the hard sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. In this study, 276 faculty representing 74 different departments participated in focus group interviews and answered questions about the characteristics and components of dissertations in their disciplines at differing levels of quality (outstanding, very good, acceptable, and unacceptable). Participating faculty were selected by high Ph.D. productivity; they had advised many doctoral students and served on many dissertation committees. The aggregate averages for focus group participants included 22 years as a professor, chairing 13 dissertations, and membership on 36 dissertation committees. Focus groups were also conducted with graduate students to add their perspectives about dissertation expectations and to evaluate how their understandings differed from those of faculty.

Lovitts aggregated the focus group interviews by discipline and analyzed the findings using qualitative software. While disciplinary distinctions are obvious in the format of dissertations, faculty perspectives were very similar in identifying the characteristics of both very good and unacceptable dissertations. From the findings, Lovitts created rubrics and matrices that outline dissertation characteristics at different levels of quality overall and for her 10 disciplines: biology, physics, engineering, mathematics, economics, psychology, sociology, English, history, and philosophy. For each discipline, the tables summarize characteristics at four quality levels (outstanding, very good, acceptable, unacceptable) for each section of the dissertation (introduction, literature review, theory, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion).

This book is an excellent resource for graduate students beginning the dissertation phase, for faculty who serve on dissertation committees or as dissertation advisors, and for faculty who may teach dissertation process courses. This text is also a valuable resource for academic departments who may want or need to develop dissertation standards from the ground up or to revamp their existing standards and expectations. The strength of Lovitts's book lies in the practical usefulness of the text, in its provision of tables and matrices with clearly delineated characteristics of varying levels of dissertation quality, and in its functionality for the different academic disciplines.

Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation has one weakness and that is its lack of discussion and findings for the disciplines of education, business, and health care. Faculty members and students in these disciplines can benefit from this text but will have to extract information from it and translate it to their own disciplines. While it would...