Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation

"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. The 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' book lies in the practical usefulness of the text...and its functionality for different academic disciplines."--The Review of Higher Education

This book and the groundbreaking study on which it is based is about making explicit to doctoral students the tacit "rules" for the assessment of the final of all final educational products--the dissertation. The purpose of defining performance expectations is to make them more transparent to graduate students while they are in the researching and writing phases, and thus to help them achieve to higher levels of accomplishment.