Graduate Students’ Role Expectations Of Supervisors:A Survey On Humanities At Four Universities In Xi’an

Humanities education represents the soft power of China’s culture development and its own development even attracts more concern. In the process of focusing on the quality of postgraduate education in the humanities, whether the postgraduate students of humanities has been effectively guided by their supervisors? What kinds of expectations do postgraduate students have on their supervisors? What kind of inner demands do postgraduate students have? These questions cannot be avoided.Based on the role theory framework, this study explores the role of supervisors in the higher education system from the perspective of students. Taking the postgraduate students expectations of the role of the supervisors’ as the breakthrough point, this study chooses more than 400 postgraduate students in Humanities from four universities in Xi’an as respondents and investigates their expectations on the supervisors’ instructions from four dimensions: personal charm expectation, academic guidance expectation, professional authority expectation, guiding relationship expectation. The research questions are as follows: What is the current situation of the postgraduate students’ expectations on their supervisors’ instructions? What differences do their expectations show? What problem do their expectations revealed? How to improve the role behavior of supervisor to maximize students satisfaction? After investigation and analysis, it can be concluded: The humanities students’ expectations on the supervisors’ is diversified and discrepant. There are some common problems in their expectations on the role of supervisors in the humanities. Postgraduate students, supervisors, universities need to work together to improve the role of the supervisors. The specific common problems include :high expectations on the supervisors; learning autonomy should be improved; less communication with supervisors; communication frequency should be improved; high expectations for academic guidance, guidance strength should be improved; pursue high academic quality, spirit, the subject cognitive guidance should be improved.In the proposed area, this study considers: the postgraduate students of humanities should strengthen the consciousness of independent study; expand communication with the supervisors; supervisors should increase the professional guidance; supervisors should strengthen the guidance of humanistic quality and humanistic spirit, universities should strengthen assessment of supervisors and establish "supervisor guidance team".