Helping Students from Different Disciplines with their Final Year/Capstone Project: Supervisors' and Students' Needs and Requests

A capstone project (CP) demands mastery of a broad range of skills, such as formulating research questions,synthesizing and cross-referencing previous literature with current findings, and writing up the study in the longest report students have probably ever written. The study reported in this chapter is part of a government-funded five-university project on co-developing a mobile app for supporting CP writing in various disciplines. This project is grounded in the belief that the ubiquitous and interactive nature of mobile learning could enrich learning and supervision experience (Källkvist et al., 2009), which in turn would lead to higher student satisfaction (Del Río et al., 2018). To develop a mobile app that helps supervisors and students, a dual-method approach was employed to gather both subjective and objective stakeholder feedback data via focus group interviews and by analysing CP reports from three disciplines to reveal common writing problems (Flowerdew, 2018). Results show that the introduction section, the literature review and the discussion sections, research mapping and referencing are four major areas of concern.