The moderating effect of research self-efficacy in the relationship between educational experience and graduate school satisfaction

Abstract

Objectives This study aims to evaluate the moderating role of research self-efficacy in the relationship between graduate students' educational experience and satisfaction with graduate schools. Methods This study used data from the 11th year (2018) of the ｢Korean Education Longitudinal Study 2005｣ and selected 197 valid respondents who answered questionnaires for graduate students. The data analysis methods are descriptive statistics and correlation analysis, and Process Macro v4.0 was used in SPSS 26.0 to analyze the moderation and interaction effects between variables. Furthermore, according to the numerical changes in research self-efficacy, a specific value selection method was used to explore the subsequent conditional effects. Results The results showed a statistic correlation between educational experience, satisfaction and research efficacy. Research self-efficacy plays a moderating role between educational experience and graduate students' satisfaction. In other words, the higher the research self-efficacy value, the more significant the impact of educational experience on the overall satisfaction of graduate students. When the research self-efficacy is at a low level, the satisfaction increases by 0.45 units for each educational experience; when the research efficacy is at a high level, the satisfaction increases by 0.80 units for each educational experience. Conclusions Based on the results of this study, graduate schools need to support graduate students administratively and systematically to improve their research self-efficacy. At the faculty level, research guidance should be provided to enable graduate students to develop the core competencies needed for conducting research. In addition, at the university level, they must provide courses and extra programs to enhance research skills. Moreover, at the university level, a curriculum or extracurricular program for research-related experiences should be provided in the future.