Best Practices for Enculturation: Collegiality, Mentoring, and Structure

Abstract

American doctoral programs remain the premier training ground for the w o r l d ' s future scientists and scholars (Clark, 1995). Every year, thousands of students enter graduate school with hopes of bright careers; many aspire t o w a rd careers as professors and scientists (Boyle, 1996). All of these p rospective scholars must begin as first-year graduate students. These students go through a cultural learn i n g or enculturation process in which they l e a rn to act as productive members of their graduate department (Corc o r a n and Clark, 1984). Organizational influences, embodied by pro c e d u res and practices, may either facilitate or hinder the enculturation process (Van Maanen and Schein, 1979).Based on our empirical examinations of graduate education and our knowledge of the graduate education literature, we highlight the best practices for facilitating enculturation. When we examined exemplary departments, particularly their organizational cultures and program stru c t u res, we found that e x e m p l a ry departments distinguished themselves in three ways: They foster collegiality among the first-year students; they support both mentoring and collegial, professional relationships between the first-year students and faculty; and they provide the first-year students with a clear sense of the program stru cture and faculty expectations.We begin with a brief description of the study from which our data are taken. We then examine how the re s e a rch on graduate education corre s p o n d s to the best practices we identified. Methods D e p a rtment Effectiveness Ratings.To identify exemplary depart m e n t s , we relied on the National Research Council (1995; NRC) effectiveness ratings. The NRC periodically rates doctoral programs' effectiveness in training re s e a rc h scholars and scientists on a scale from 0 (not effective) to 5 (extremely eff e ctive). The effectiveness ratings of the departments included in this study had a mean of 3.17 and a standard deviation of .44. P a rt i c i p a n t s . We interviewed sixty-six students and faculty from a larg e , public re s e a rch university. We interviewed thirty-six domestic first-year students from ten graduate departments. From each of these ten departments, we i n t e rviewed one graduate director and two advanced graduate students for a total of thirty interviews with senior department members. The ten departments re p resented departments across the physical/life sciences, social sciences, and humanities. I n t e rview Pro c e d u re s . The first-year graduate students were interv i e w e d t h ree times during their first year: within the first few weeks of entry, near the end of their first semester, and during their second semester of graduate school. The interviews covered a range of topics. We re p o rt the data that re l a t e to their perceptions of the departmental cultures into which they had entere d , the social and professional relationships they were forming, and the first-year requirements. Each interview took approximately one hour....

A Mixed Research Investigation of Factors Related to Time to the Doctorate in Education

“…With respect to program-level factors, the size of a department housing the program, proportion of female students, and mean GRE quantitative score were statistically significantly associated with the timing of doctorate attainment. A decrease in the size of the department housing the program was associated with a statistically significant increase in the odds of doctorate attainment in the program, a finding that agrees with the literature indicating that smaller departments are associated with shorter TTD (Bauer 2004;Boyle & Boice, 1998;Dinham & Scott, 1999;Ferrer de Valero, 2001). The higher the proportion of female students or the mean GRE quantitative score, the higher the odds of doctorate attainment in any given year in the program, other factors held constant.…”

Mentoring Doctoral Students in a Developing Society

“…They all emphasize the aspect of personalized advice, relationship. Going one step ahead Friendship (Kram, 1985) and honest self-disclosure (Boyle & Boice, 1998;Johnson, 2003) have been identified as significant mentor functions. As a matter of fact, all these things are the practices that are involved right from the beginning of the doctoral program, at all levels of the research work.…”

The Flip Side of the Attrition Coin: Faculty Perceptions of Factors Supporting Graduate Student Success

“…As Ferreira (2003) and Hirt and Muffo (1998) note, each university department establishes its own recruitment and admission policies, curriculum, performance criteria, and expectations for how students should spend their time and talent. The extant research on departmental climate has identified several issues related to student socialization and decisions to persist or leave, including the availability of explicit information about program expectations, the use of preliminary and qualifying exams which provide feedback to students early in their programs, opportunities to engage in research early in graduate training, opportunities for diverse skill development to strengthen post-graduation career success, and the propensity for students to work in isolation (Boyle & Boice, 1998;Earl-Novell, 2006;Gardener, 2009b;Golde, 2005;Golde & Dore, 2001;Hirt & Muffo, 1998;Solem & Schlemper, 2009). In addition to establishing policies and practices that influence doctoral student success, "feeling cared about and appreciated at the departmental" level can also serve as a buffer to emotional exhaustion for graduate students and is connected to successful completion (Hunter & Devine, 2016, p. 52).…”