Japanese adapted physical education graduate students’ learning about master’s research thesis projects

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this study was to describe how Japanese adapted physical education (APE)graduate students engage themselves in learning research skills through masters’ research thesis projects. In this study, andragogy theory was utilized, which allowed the researchers to understand Japanese graduate students’ learning experiences of master’s research thesis projects. Five Japanese APE master’s students (3 men and 2 women) participated in the study, which had a descriptive-qualitative design using an in-depth, semi-structured interview approach. The data source was face to face interviews. Interview data were analyzed using a constant comparative method, and resulted in themes related to (a) reasons for selecting a master’s research thesis topic, (b) learning challenges of research methods, and (c) peer evaluation and collaboration. To better support Japanese graduate students, this study encourages APE faculty and graduate students to learn how to develop a blueprint of the research design, research method, and presentation of the results and discussion using various research sources in the graduate students’ research seminars. This study posits that Japanese APE graduate students will benefit from a learning strategy such as language translation-oriented strategy that enables them to capture the nuance of content learning in APE.