2002 Volume 7 Issue 2 Pages 1-9
Though there have been significant number of interesting studies on graduate students' research environment, they still lack long-term view of their research activities. The purpose of this study is to clarify graduate students' long-term use of their research environment. We focused on "Research Settings" such as formal research meetings and informal conversation within students' rooms, where most of the master course students took part in to acquire indispensable research information for their theses, and conducted investigations (interview + questionnaire) on 22 masters of a department of interdisciplinary studies, of their evaluation of usefulness of these research settings at each stage of their research activity. Consequently, their styles of the use of research settings in long-term were categorized into 3 types: "Moderate Use", "Purposeful Use" both of multiple settings, and "Exclusive Use of Students' Room". The students of former 2 types tended to evaluate formal laboratory meetings as more informative than informal conversation in students' room at the initial stage of their research, i.e. the exploratory stage, but, on the other hand, the other way round at the following practicing stage. The results suggest that the research environment should be examined in long-term view according to at least 2 stages.
