A Review of Effective Doctoral Supervision: What Is It and How Can We Achieve It?

Alias Masek,Maizam Alias

doi:10.13189/ujer.2020.080633

Abstract

The success of doctoral students greatly depends on effective supervision. Many factors however, are involved in ensuring effective supervision. This study identifies the different definitions of effective supervisions, types of doctoral outcomes and the associated factors that contribute to these outcomes, with a view of proposing a framework to achieve the goal of effective supervision. A systematic review was conducted on published articles from the year 2000 to the year 2018. The documents were selected based on the three major components of doctoral supervision namely, management system, students and supervisor, thus framing the systematic review. The review resulted in several key findings namely, definitions, domains of doctoral outcomes and factors that can potentially contribute to doctoral outcomes. Diverse definitions of effective supervision were observed; often associated with self-development, professional growth and career development of doctoral students. Four domains of doctoral outcomes were identified: knowledge-base, research skills, attitudes and professional skills. Factors that influence doctoral outcomes include environment, attitude and aptitude of doctoral students, and experience and training of supervisors. The findings of this review provide useful information for guiding the implementation of an effective supervision framework.

Highlights

Innovations and new knowledge would not be possible without the contributions from researchers around the globe
Graduate research students are contributing to the research personnel statistics, having them graduated on time would be more beneficial as supervisors whose students have graduated will be available to train new research students – leading to more research personnel
The returned documents were very large in number and a quick review of the abstracts indicates that the documents can be categorised into the three major components of doctoral supervision namely, management system, students and supervisor, which was used to frame the systematic review

Summary

Introduction

Innovations and new knowledge would not be possible without the contributions from researchers around the globe. Take the example of Malaysia and Japan: Malaysia as a developing nation has 1,643 researchers per million people whilst Japan as a developed nation has 5,158 researchers per million people [1] These data include doctoral students as part of the research personnel statistics. There is no agreed definition of effective supervision; it varies according to institutions depending on an institution’s vision and mission, and values [2], and research output, as well as educational policies [3] where a university is often made responsible in fulfilling the interest of stakeholders. Such circumstances have resulted in varying definitions of effective supervision in the current literature

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion