Students’ Perceptions of Doctoral Supervision: A Study in an Engineering Program in Australia

Abstract

Aim/Purpose: The overall aim of this study was to improve our understanding of engineering student satisfaction and expectations with PhD supervision and their perceptions of the roles in a supervisory relationship. Background: Studies on PhD supervision quality are highly valuable, mainly when they provide information on supervision experiences from students’ perspectives, rather than from supervisors’ perspectives. Understanding how PhD students think, their preferences and their perceptions of roles in a supervision process can help enhance the quality of supervision, and consequently, form better researchers and produce better research outcomes. Methodology: The method employed in this investigation was based on a student survey with scaled and open-ended questions of 30 full-time engineering PhD students from a research institution in Australia. Contribution: Studies that provide a better understanding of how engineering PhD students think and how they expect a supervisory relationship to be are limited. This study can be used to derive recommendations for improving supervisory relationships, particularly in engineering schools and institutions. Findings: The majority of the students perceived most of the supervisor and student roles in close agreement with the roles described in the literature and existing codes of practice for the supervision of higher degree research students. The main reasons for dissatisfaction with supervision were identified as being the lack of involvement of supervisors in the research projects, particularly in the writing process, and the lack of supervisor’s knowledge in the field being supervised. Recommendations for Practitioners: It is recommended that the roles of each party in a supervision process be discussed and clarified at the beginning of any PhD candidature to avoid false student expectations. The right supervisory fit should be ensured early in the candidature, and additional supervisors should be added to the team if the expertise of supervisors is deemed insufficient. The use of supervisory panels as opposed to individual supervisions to ensure that responsibilities are shared and to increase the range of advice and support available to each student is highly recommended. Recommendation for Researchers: It is recommended that this type of research be expanded to other disciplines. It is also recommended that specific actions be taken to improve supervision and these be correlated to satisfaction rates and/or student performance.

Alignment of Doctoral Student and Supervisor Expectations in Malaysia

“…The growing concern for quality student-supervisor relationships (Katz, 2018;Orellana et al, 2016;Roberts et al, 2019), and their significant impact on the quality of supervision and overall students' satisfaction (Davis, 2019;Friedrich-Nel & Mac Kinnon, 2019;Helfer & Drew, 2019;Hunter & Devine, 2016;Mantai, 2019;Roach et al, 2019), has put the student-supervisor relationship at the center of the supervisory process (McCallin & Nayar, 2012, p.5), leading to the development of a number of models of supervision (a brief discussion of the most popular models can be found in Lee (2010) and Benmore (2016)). Such models are commonly developed based on traditional master-apprentice pedagogy that considers the supervisor (the master) as an expert in the subject and methodology, and the student as an apprentice who learns from their guru.…”

“…Within the context of these various demands, the alignment of expectations between the student and supervisor has become paramount to both sides (Phang et al, 2014;Severinsson, 2015). While the growing literature on student-supervisor relationships over the past 30 years suggests the importance of clarifying student-supervisor expectations at the early stage of candidature (Cadman, 2000;Masek, 2017;Woolderink et al, 2015), expectations around the roles and responsibilities of each party in research remain mainly implicit (Barry et al, 2018;Helfer & Drew, 2019;Masek, 2017;Sambrook, 2016).…”

“…Like many human relationships, student-supervisor relationships can be problematic if expectations between individuals are vague or misunderstood. While the growing literature on doctoral supervision acknowledges the importance of setting, clarifying, negotiating and reviewing student-supervisor expectations (Parker-Jenkins, 2016;Sambrook, 2016;Stracke & Kumar, 2020) and considers it a key success factor in the supervision process (Phillips & Pugh, 2005), expectations around the roles and responsibilities of each party remain largely unarticulated (Barry et al, 2018;Davis, 2019;Helfer & Drew, 2019;Mantai, 2019;Masek, 2017). Therefore, this study addresses two central questions:…”

Academic Failure: Unspoken Experiences by International Postgraduate Students in a Malaysian University

“…On the other side of the coin, scholars who have studied academic failure of undergraduate students, such as Ajjawi et al, (2019a), have defined the "failure" concept as students obtaining a fail grade for one or more subjects during their studies. Scholars such as Helfer and Drew (2019), however, refer to academic failure experiences of postgraduate students as "unhappy, discouraged or disappointed" (p. 512), stressed, exhausted and burn out (Cornér et al, 2017) or experiencing low satisfaction and engagement levels (Löfström & Pyhältö, 2014) due to an ineffective supervision process and other related issues pertaining to international postgraduate students. The most common challenge faced by international postgraduate students is limited English proficiency skills in writing, reading and speaking (Alsahafi & Shin, 2017;Li et al, 2018).…”

A (de)formed perception of the pathway to be taken during the PhD. The influence of time in the students’ eyes perception in becoming a researcher.

“…During the PhD, researchers are formed, and they can be developers, innovative and creative -a doctorate should think "out of the box" but also "inside the box". These characteristics must be developed during the doctorate when the researcher is constructed, based on frontier knowledge, research competences as creativity, originality, innovation, and critical thinking, but also in leadership versus teamwork, independence, autonomy (Baptista, Frick, Holley, Remmik, Tesche, Âkerlind, 2015;Durette, Fournier & Lafon, 2016;Maguire, & Delahunt, 2017;Helfer & Drew, 2019) and all of these with the constraints that appear during the development of the research process [Medeiros, Watts & Mumford, 2017]. So it is important to perceive if the academic training given by the supervisor will shape the future researcher, as a follower or as an innovator.…”