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There is a significant absence in academic literature, textbooks and practical teaching tools for advising or guiding student learning, in a practical non-prescriptive manner, toward topic selection and development. Prescriptive or rational approaches, taken by many research methods textbooks, are not adequate or sufficient when teaching this important first stage in the research process. Nonprescriptive approaches describing manageable steps should be researched more to fill this pedagogic gap. This paper attempts to promote academic discussion on a pedagogic gap that is broadly overlooked, and to examine how marketing and business academics can better instruct dissertation students in the area of dissertation topic selection. At the end of this paper a teaching framework for dissertation topic selection is presented. INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALE It has been recognised that teaching and supervising marketing dissertation students is a complex (McCormack & Pamphilon 2004), poorly understood (Grant 1999) and under-researched pedagogy (Harrington & Booth 2003). With the advent of performance-driven measures in all aspects of teaching and instruction, supervisors and teachers in the area of marketing dissertation research are increasingly coming under pressure to relate their activities to ‘accountability and appraisal, excellence, effectiveness and efficiency’, as listed in McCormack & Pamphilon (2004). This pressure is coming when opinion suggests that there is a lack of effective teaching tools in this area of dissertation research methods, no consensus to best practice and little empirical research being conducted to rectify this (Harrington & Booth 2003). The motivation for writing this paper comes from a personal interest to improve classroom guidance and diminish student frustration at the commencement of their research process. Following calls for pedagogic gaps to be to filled (Harrington & Booth 2003), this paper attempts to deal with the first stage in the marketing dissertation process pedagogy: topic selection. There is a significant gap in academic literature, textbooks and practical teaching aids for advising or guiding students in a practical non-prescriptive manner toward topic selection development and rationale. Prescriptive guidelines are listed in textbooks (Saunders et al 2003; Malhotra & Birks 2003; Burns & Bush 1998; Crask et al 1995; Easterby-Smith 1991) but these are quiet limited in terms of practical application or direction for the novice student researcher. By developing nonprescriptive techniques the teaching community may be better equipped to deal with what is perceived as a daunting first step in doing research (L'Anson & Smith 2004). The secondary aim of this paper is to promote and develop academic discussion on a topic that is broadly overlooked; the examination of how marketing and business academics can better instruct dissertation students in the area of topic selection. This paper suggests a framework for developing appropriate teaching methods in the identified pedagogic gap. ISSUES REGARDING DISSERTATION

Towards Non-prescriptive Issues: a Teaching Framework for Selecting Marketing Dissertation Topics