Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education最新文献

Purpose

Increasingly governmental policy around PhD education has resulted in greater university oversight of programs and student experience – often through creating central PhD Schools. While student experience is well researched, the experiences of Heads of these units, who are responsible for creating student experience, have been invisible. This exploratory Danish case study begins such a conversation: its purpose to examine the perceptions of five Heads of PhD Humanities Schools, each responsible for steering institutional decisions within Danish PhD policy landscapes.

Design/methodology/approach

A qualitative approach integrated three distinct analyses: a review of Danish PhD education policies and university procedures, each university’s job specifications for the Heads of the Schools and the Heads’ views on their responsibilities.

Findings

The Heads differentiated between their own and today’s PhD student experience. They had held prior leadership roles and fully supported institutional regulations. They cared deeply for the students under their charge and were working to achieve personal goals to enhance PhD experience. Their leadership perspective was relational: enhancing individual student learning through engaging with multiple PhD actors (e.g. program leaders) – when possible at a personal level – to improve PhD practices.

Originality/value

This study contributes an expanded perspective on how PhD School Heads constitute their roles by empirically linking: macro-national policies and institutional regulations and individuals’ biographies to their support of the PhD regimes – with implications for academic leadership generally. The authors argue research into PhD School leadership is essential, as it is such individuals who create the organisational settings that students experience.

Purpose

Strengths-based professional development has been associated with positive outcomes in academia and in the organizational workplace. Students pursuing their doctoral degrees in the biomedical sciences in the US are often on graduate assistantships, where they experience an academic component to their training integrated with an employee-like existence. The individual who serves as their academic and research advisor is often their supervisor, who pays their stipend. The traditional training structure poses unique challenges and may be accompanied by stress, burnout and imposter phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to utilize a strengths-based approach to equip students with essential personal and professional skills that build self-awareness and self-confidence further preparing them for their future in the scientific workforce.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors developed and implemented a novel strengths-based professional development cohort program for doctoral students in the biomedical sciences at a research-intensive (R1) institution. The program was designed to create a supportive and inclusive space for participants (n = 18) to explore their identity as a student and scientists and to develop and leverage their talents for more effective and strategic use. Program outcomes were evaluated through a mixed methods case study design using a post-program Likert-based survey (n = 10 participants) and participant interviews (n = 13). Explanatory sequential design was used in the interpretation of the findings.

Findings

The results show that the program had a positive impact on students’ perceptions of themselves as scientists, as well as on their self-efficacy, self-confidence and interpersonal interactions in the research setting.

Practical implications

This strengths-based professional development program demonstrates immense potential as a model to equip students with self-awareness and a new foundation of essential skills needed to supplement their technical and scientific training for their future careers in the team-based workplace.

Originality/value

This study demonstrates how professional development programming can complement scientific training by equipping students with self-awareness and other lifelong skills to navigate feelings of imposter phenomenon and interpersonal relationships in the team-based workplace.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine how two socio-historical contexts within the United States, the Movement for Black Lives and the COVID-19 pandemic, informed approaches to improving racial climate in science, technology, mathematics and engineering (STEM) graduate education.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors used a general qualitative inquiry research study design to conduct focus groups (n = 121) with graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty members from across STEM disciplines as well as administrators whose work involves STEM graduate students. Participants were from two US institutions involved in a National Science Foundation networked improvement community seeking to create inclusive environments for STEM graduate students.

Findings

This study demonstrates how these socio-historical contexts illuminated and amplified on-going efforts to address racial climate for graduate students in US-based graduate education. In response to these events, STEM faculty devoted time that otherwise might have gone to purely technical or scientific endeavors to addressing racial climate. However, some faculty members remain hesitant to address racial climate and efforts appear to have further waned over time. While diversity, inclusion and equity efforts came to the forefront of the collective consciousness during this time, participants worry that these efforts are not sustainable, particularly without support from faculty and administrators.

Practical implications

The findings from this study will inform efforts to improve racial climate in STEM graduate programs.

Originality/value

This study fills an identified need to capture how socio-historical contexts, like the US Movement for Black Lives and the COVID-19 pandemic, have influenced approaches to improving racial climate in STEM graduate programs.

Purpose

This paper aims to examine how doctoral students in education and applied linguistics fields successfully navigated graduate writing demands by participating in a support community that catalyzed writing productivity, peer mentoring and feedback. Guiding graduate students’ writing processes based on scholarly interests and providing peer support are vital to scholarly productivity and transition into academia.

Design/methodology/approach

Following a collaborative analytic autoethnographic case study design (Adams et al., 2022; Chang et al., 2013), the authors narrated major events that impacted their writing and publication experiences. The authors visualized their entire doctoral writing experience based on the frequency of writing events that contributed to writing productivity. In data triangulation discussions, the authors reflected on writing experiences.

Findings

Findings show that the support community alleviated individual struggles associated with writing a dissertation and high-quality papers. Key factors contributing to scholarly growth included nonevaluative peer support, feedback and shared academic resources. Writing within the periphery of faculty research and predominantly focusing on doctoral milestones led to individual scholarly interests being overshadowed. Without structured guidance, doctoral writers may develop initiatives to alleviate individual struggles and meet academic writing demands in the disciplines.

Research limitations/implications

The authors recommend including structured guidance on developing writing productivity and a personal research agenda in the early stages of the doctorate.

Originality/value

This study offers unique examples of how a student group supported writing productivity and socialization into the academic community. It illustrates the multifaceted nature of academic writing influenced by faculty–student relationships, peers and individual initiatives. This paper provides doctoral writers and graduate programs with examples of accomplishing academic publishing goals.

Purpose

This paper aims to show how an Academic Literacies lens can contribute to a deeper understanding of writing for a professional doctorate (PD) by focusing both on the language of supervisors’ written feedback and on student and supervisor perspectives on feedback throughout Year 1 (Y1).

Design/methodology/approach

Firstly, written feedback summaries on formative assessments across two Y1 cohorts on a UK PD programme were analysed thematically to identify patterns in feedback practices. Secondly, two longitudinal, detailed student/supervisor case studies were developed, drawing on multiple data sources.

Findings

Supervisors’ written feedback enacted an encouraging dialogue around assessed writing, discursively constructing a sense of solidarity on the doctoral journey, focusing on the “long view”. Case study analysis, however, revealed tensions centred around jarring discontinuities in students’ feedback experience as they transitioned from formative to summative assessment at the end of Y1.

Research limitations/implications

The paper demonstrates that an Academic Literacies approach can offer valuable insights into the specific, situated context of writing for a distance learning PD and makes the case for greater attention to writing in contexts of partly taught doctorates.

Practical implications

Findings suggest that PD programmes should work towards providing continuity of feedback experience, through supervisor and examiner training and through assessment arrangements which support students to navigate challenging transitions between formative and summative phases of assessment.

Originality/value

This paper reports on an innovative research design which combined a textual “snapshot” of supervisory feedback, paying close attention to language, with detailed longitudinal case studies exploring perspectives on feedback over time. It contributes to doctoral writing research by throwing light on the relatively underexplored domain of writing in the taught phase of the PD. It contributes to doctoral education studies by highlighting the central role of feedback on writing in shaping the experience of PD researchers.

Purpose

This study aims to understand the role of seeking social support in the relationship between perceived helplessness, self-efficacy and satisfaction among graduate students during the pandemic, drawing upon the transactional model of stress and coping. Graduate students are composed of nontraditional students who are considered significantly different from traditional students. Nonetheless, research has yet to explore how seeking social support contributed to graduate students’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially to the relationship between feelings of helplessness and positive mental health. More specifically, this study examined how seeking social support from others mediates the relationship between perceived helplessness and self-efficacy, academic satisfaction and general life satisfaction among graduate students.

Design/methodology/approach

Using quantitative data collected from 545 graduate students at a large, research-intensive university in the USA, structural equation modeling was used to test our conceptual model.

Findings

The results of this study indicate that perceived helplessness has a direct and adverse relationship with self-efficacy. Social support mediates the negative relationship between the two variables, buffering the negative psychological experience students feel and leading to higher levels of self-efficacy and two domains of satisfaction. Self-efficacy is positively associated with academic and general life satisfaction among graduate students. Academic satisfaction positively predicts general life satisfaction, as well. A conceptual model was developed, yielding acceptable goodness-of-fit statistics.

Originality/value

This study adds to the postsecondary education literature and contributes to the larger discourse identifying the positive role of social support in supporting graduate students to cope with psychological challenges that may be exacerbated under stressful conditions.

Purpose

This study aims to present the evaluation of a competency-based online professional development training program, PhD Progression, tied to a digital badge system, created to support PhD students across fields.

Design/methodology/approach

This study took place at Boston University, a large, nonprofit, Carnegie Classified R1 research-intensive institution located in the northeastern region of the USA. Through internal campus collaborations, the authors developed a PhD core capacities framework. Building from this framework, the authors designed the first learning level of the program and ran a pilot study with PhD students from various fields and at different stages of their PhD. Using surveys and focus groups, the authors collected both quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate this program.

Findings

The quantitative and qualitative data show that the majority of the PhD student participants found the contents of the competency-based training program useful, appropriate for building skills and knowledge and therefore relevant for both their degree progress and their future job. Gaining digital badges significantly increased their motivation to complete training modules.

Practical implications

This type of resource is scalable to other institutions that wish to provide self-paced professional development support to their PhD students while rewarding them for investing time in building professional skills and enabling them to showcase these skills to potential employers.

Originality/value

This study demonstrates, for the first time, that tying a digital badging system to a competency-based professional development program significantly motivates PhD students to set professional development goals and invest time in building skills.

Purpose

In light of a largely negative discourse, this study aims to identify the various ways in which PhD mums have been supported in a range of contexts to develop a comprehensive typology of positive support, as well as to identify patterns that transcend institutional, national and disciplinary borders.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is guided by ecological systems theory which allows for the investigation of the various interrelated systems that influence (in this case) doctoral researchers. A mixed-methods survey elicited the first-hand experiences from recent and current PhD mums across the world.

Findings

The authors have identified a range of potential supports for PhD mums, but note a careful balance is needed to ensure that PhD mums are supported in their roles as both mother and doctoral researcher, where support in one domain does not contradict nor ignore support for the other.

Originality/value

This study complements the existing knowledge body, which consists mainly of localised studies, by providing a birds-eye view of issues that transcend national, geographic and disciplinary borders. A topography provides a visual map of the various sources of potential support and the complicated relationships between them.

Purpose

Graduate students employed in graduate teaching and research assistantship positions have a unique experience of the institution because of their status as student-employees. Graduate assistants (GAs) face specific challenges around their well-being as they navigate various relationships and environments throughout their educational trajectory. The purpose of this study is to examine the specific workplace challenges GAs experience and their overall effect on GA wellbeing.

Design/methodology/approach

This research study examines graduate assistant responses from 12 US research universities to the Faculty Survey of student Engagement for Graduate student Instructors survey. This study’s analysis examined the open-ended responses (n = 493) at the end of the survey that asked participants for additional comments regarding their departmental and/or institutional experiences. Three waves of coding were implemented by the authors to identify common themes and areas of concern on GA working conditions.

Findings

The findings led to the creation of a concept map on GA working conditions that include three main components: contextual factors, stress and well-being and competing tensions. Within each component are subthemes related to social identity, funding, campus climate, time and priority concerns and assistantship structure and support. The map demonstrates the enmeshed connection across areas.

Practical implications

Findings suggest institutional investments through programming, system-level changes and interpersonal support to improve GA working conditions and their well-being.

Originality/value

Research on GA experiences with working conditions and well-being in a US context is limited. This study is valuable because many graduate students who occupy graduate assistantships are asking for increased pay and benefits at their institution. Graduate assistantship labor organizing is occurring alongside institutions’ focus on improving health outcomes for graduate students.

Purpose

While ample literature describes students’ experiences during graduate school, fewer studies examine how doctoral students transition into full-time employment post degree completion. The purpose of this study is to examine how faculty advisors, as well as other individuals, shape students’ experiences during a critical period in their graduate education – the job search.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is based on interviews with 47 PhD students in biological sciences in the US. This is a descriptive qualitative study, based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews.

Findings

Results reveal distinct roles that faculty advisors play in the job search process, including supportive, unsupportive and sponsorship. Supportive advisors offer opportunities for skill development and specific guidance during the job search process. Sponsorship advisors go beyond providing general support to leverage their personal networks to assist in the transition into full-time employment. Unsupportive advisors are on the other end of the spectrum and do not provide any assistance. In addition, the majority of doctoral students rely on individuals beyond their advisors during the job search, and they do so regardless of what type of support they receive from their advisors.

Originality/value

Presented findings highlight the complex constellation of social connections that graduate students draw on for entry into the career and make a compelling case for extending socialization research to dedicate more attention to students’ transition into full-time employment after degree completion.