How learners establish their metacognitive awareness in collaborative learning, Ahsen Çini

Afterwards, a very lengthy discussion took place between the opponent and the PhD candidate. The questions widely ranged form generic to specific, technical, referring to a specific study, to a certain method or to the whole dissertation. Also, the language of the discussion remained formal, with the candidate politely answering the questions, always beginning her speech with "Dear opponent, thank you for your question."  

I managed to note some of the questions that were phrased below.

The starting question of the opponent was:

"Dear candidate, lets start with a general question. Why did you choose this topic, as I said metacognition and collaborative learning are research topics that have been pursued for some years, so what did drive you in starting your PhD projects, did you identify some research gaps or figured you could combine your knowledge to contribute to this field somehow?"

The candidate went on to analyze her diverse academic background and her involvement in different scientific fields and how that fueled her desire of bridging those fields in her work. 

The question that followed was:

"A rather general question but a bit more specific about the methods, can you retrospectively if you can share your experience about why did you change methods, which one you would recommend for the future?"

She proceeded to justify her options, saying that she used methods that were new and advanced. 

A question further on the discussion, was:

"Can you elaborate on the emotional measures - you used two types of facial expression analysis, and compare which one was better-suited?"

"Emotions like metacognition are not linear, they are dynamic, and change over time." She went on to explain that to realize the nature of emotions she used some specific method.

The last question of the opponent looked into the future.

"Assuming you have a large grant, how would you precede, which is the most important part of your research that you would base your future research on, and what are the most important questions that remain?"

To which the candidate replied:

"The future should focus on the collaborative group context, because we don't really know how individual effect groups and vice versa, to understand this we use multi-modal data, in my future studies i would really like to measure the interaction of groups, with video data for example, in addition to quantitative level i would also like to use qualitative level of measure to understand the interaction, ....."

Then the opponent makes their final statement.

"Following up the thesis with different questions in different areas and research topics that are very important in scientific research like methods, applications ... What I have seen that the candidate provided us with a current topic but well founded topic in a very deep manner and really enriched research on different levels, disciplines, areas. This is a great basis for performing further research and being part of the scientific community. The candidate provided a multi-faceted approach which really tells us a lot about processes. ... Those complex scenarios, features, variable, methods, can be explained quite easily if you can, and that's what we've seen today and this is the basis of scientific research, because its not only about talking to experts but also to a larger audience and getting the ideas to the people. "

"... It's not about showing how complex things are, its about making complex things simple, and that's what we all seen today.

Built on my impression of the thesis and in our oral session, I get to my final impression and I really would like to propose the approval of the dissertation, to the doctoral committee for further procedure and hopefully to having you as long as we can in the scientific community. "