In accordance with the Bologna agreement one or two final undergraduate theses or degree projects are included in all academic degrees on bachelor and master level in Sweden (Higher Education Act, 1992, Higher Education Ordinance, 1993). This poses a particular challenge in academic professional education since the relation between general academic knowledge and specific professional competence could be described as a central issue in this area (Hansen Orwehag, 2008). One of the main reasons for this is that the writing of the thesis is intended to enhance the student’s professional ability to take a critical stance and to identify, analyze and solve professional problems via the application of research-based knowledge to issues encountered in everyday practice as well as to demonstrate the student’s theoretical academic subject knowledge. This paper explores one aspect of the preliminary results from a main study of supervisors’ understanding of the significance of the undergraduate thesis as a tool of enhancing the academic knowledge of students, as well as in terms of its “usefulness” in relation to their professional work in three different areas, as teachers, nurses and social workers. The underlying assumption is that the explicit or implicit views of the supervisor will, in this respect, influence her/his way of guiding the student through the thesis work and thereby also the learning outcome for the individual student.

In this paper teacher education is taken as an example and the results are based on interviews with supervisors within the teacher education in relation to the program’s Swedish regulatory documents and thesis guidelines. Discourse analysis (Winther Jørgensen & Phillips, 2005) is used to identify different underlying assumptions in the supervisors’ conception of the meaning and nature of the degree project.

The main study will subsequently relate the three academic professions of teacher, nurse and social worker to each other in this respect, in order to explore similarities and differences between the three groups of supervisors in relation to their respective program. Finally, the results will be put in relation to a parallel study in a Scottish context.