Research On The Relationship Between The Tutor And The Postgraduate From The Perspective Of The Role Expectation

Along with the expansion of our country’s postgraduate enrollment,the problems about the quality of graduate education are becoming increasingly prominent. In recent years, more attention is paid to the tutor-postgraduate relationship. There are many factors affecting the tutor-postgraduate relationship, the paper will analyze the relationship between tutors and graduate students from the perspective of role expectation theory.Role expectation means that one group or an individual hopes someone’s behavior is accord with his role norm.Based on Liu Ping’s questionnaire of tutor-postgraduate relationship and Wen Shufeng’s scale of tutor-postgraduate relationship,we designed the questionnaire of tutor-postgraduate relationship.There are 300 postgraduates from Beijing University of Technology participated the investigation.We also completed a in-depth interview with 6 postgraduates and 5tutors from the same university. The study aims to know the status of tutor-postgraduate relationship, explore how the role expectation affects the tutor-postgraduate relationship, and give some advice to optimize the relationship between the tutors and graduate students.The conclusions are as follows:1. Although there is a difference between tutors’ behavior and the postgraduates’ expectation on the tutors, the tutor-postgraduate relationship is in good condition.2. There are significant differences in the tutor-postgraduate communication ways in these variables such as different grades, the tutor title, the numbers of students guided by the tutor, the tutor position.There is significant difference in the tutor-postgraduate communication frequency in these variables including different disciplines, the tutors’ gender and the number of students guided by the tutor.There is significant difference in the tutor-postgraduate communication initiative between the tutors with different positions. And there is no difference in the communication contents.3. Significant differences exist in the tutor-postgraduate relationship evaluation in these variables such as the tutor gender, different disciplines, grades and the type of the tutor-postgraduate relationship, but there is no significant difference in thetutor-postgraduate relationship evaluation between the numbers of students guided by the tutor.4. There are significant differences in the expected communication way between different tutor titles.There are significant differences in the expected communication frequency between the tutors with different numbers of students.There are significant differences in the expected communication initiative between the numbers of students guided by the tutor.And there is no significant difference in expected communication contents in these variables including grades, different disciplines, and the number of students guided by the tutor.5. The contents and ways of communication have an effect on the tutors-postgraduate relationship. Firstly, when the tutor communicates face-to-face with only one student, the tutor-postgraduate relationship is more harmonious than the communicating way of e-mail. Secondly, when the tutor communicates with students by meeting or short message, the tutor-postgraduate relationship is worse than the communicating way of e-mail. Lastly, when the tutor talks about the things in life other than in tutor’s subjects, the relationship is more balanced.