Postgraduate Research Students Research Articles

My supervisor is so busy. Informal spaces for postgraduate learning in the Health Sciences.

This descriptive study investigates a one-on-one writing consultancy as an informal learning space, formed to assist postgraduate research students (PRS) with thesis writing. The consultancy was held monthly on Sundays and appointments booked for up to one hour. During that time writing problems were identified and recommendations made to overcome these. Over the nine months 52 consults were held with 23 PhDs and 21 Master’s candidates, the remaining consults were for non-degree writing purposes. Consults proved dichotomous with advice sought for both writing and non-writing related issues. Conspicuous were findings indicative of the high workloads carried by supervisory staff which thwarted PRS interaction. The one-on-one consultancy has many characteristics of alternative research-related spaces used elsewhere to provide PRS support. It is suggested that informal learning spaces, similar to the one-on-one writing consultancy, be investigated as a way to support PRSs and improve their throughput numbers.

Do Academics Doubt Their Own Research?

When do experts doubt or question their own previously published research and why? An online survey was designed and distributed across academic staff and postgraduate research students at different universities in Great Britain. Respondents (n=202-244) identified the likelihoods of six different (quasi) hypothetical occurrences causing them to doubt or question work they have published in peer reviewed journals. They are: two objective and two semi-objective citation based metrics, plus two semi-objective metrics based on verbalised reactions. Only limited support is found from this study to suggest that the authors of primary research would agree with any judgements made by others about their research based on these metrics. The occurrence most likely to cause respondents to doubt or question their previously published research was where the majority of citing studies suggested mistakes in their work. In a multivariate context, only age and nationality are significant determinants of doubt beyond average likelihoods. Understanding and acknowledging what makes authors of primary research doubt their own research could increase the validity of those who pass judgement.

Postgraduate Research Students’ and their Supervisors’ Attitudes towards Supervision

There is a need for research exploring postgraduate research students’ expectations from research supervisors, the characteristics of effective student-supervisor relationships, and the opinions of students and supervisors about research supervision. We also need instruments to explore the student-supervisor relationship. The present study investigated postgraduate research students’ and research supervisors’ views about postgraduate research supervision and the student supervisor relationship. It also reports on factor analysis conducted to identify the underlying dimensions in their views about postgraduate research supervision and the student supervisor relationship. Such information can be used to develop strategies to promote student-supervisor relationships and enhance the student experience. Data were collected using an online questionnaire with 30 Likert-scale statements from 131 postgraduate research students and 77 supervisors. Following exploratory factor analysis, a three factor model consisting of leaderhip, knowledge, and support was extracted. Results indicate that students and supervisors agree about the attributes of effective supervision. Both supervisors and students consider that a supervisor should have an interest in the student’s research. The supervisor must provide timely and constructive feedback and should help the student to manage time effectively. Students and supervisors believe a supervisor should help the students where limitations and learning needs are identified. Students believe supervisors must encourage students to work independently and use opportunities to present their work.

Examining theses and dissertations: Demystifying the process

Since the examination process is sometimes 'enshrouded in mystery', this article adds to the postgraduate (PG) examination culture by reporting the results of an exploratory study conducted in two phases in the Faculty of Management Studies at a large research university in South Africa. Following an in-depth review of the examiners' reports for a three-year period (2009-2011), an electronic survey was conducted among the examiners of a business faculty at a large research university, who were appointed during the aforementioned period. It became evident from this study that there are variations in terms of the range of requirements. Yet, universally, examiners of doctoral (PhD) theses and master's dissertations strive to achieve the same objectives, namely that the candidate should undertake a substantial and coherent original piece of research worthy of publication. When developing their reports of theses and dissertations, the following themes emerged: literature, technical presentation, content, methodology, which themes are also more or less similar to other international findings. Furthermore, the examiners' perception of a good/poor/passable thesis/dissertation stems from or is linked to 'unpacking' the abovementioned themes. There is also much congruence between the comments in the examiners' reports and what they reported in the survey. The findings, albeit exploratory, can be useful to research supervisors, examiners, and PG research students.

Investigation of International Students’ Perception of ‘Community’ in a British Higher Education Institute

This paper investigates the perceptions of members of our international student community by giving them a voice and a platform to explore their feelings as part of a Higher Education institute in the UK and whether they consider that the university is a global environment. Our data is based on a series of structured interviews with twelve students from twelve different countries, inclusive of four postgraduate research students. Our findings reveal that our international students commonly feel part of multiple smaller communities but interestingly, they were less sure of their part within an institute-wide community. The postgraduate students’ perceptions of community were quite divergent when compared to the undergraduate perceptions, which we will continue to explore in our future work. Our data supports the perception from international students that their university is a global community, but there were distinct differences in how individuals defined it and some limitations to consider. Some defined it as students and staff of different nationalities being present at a university whilst other definitions relied on cultural characteristics within the institution as a whole. We reflect upon the implications of our research as these perceptions shape international student opinion of Higher Education institutes and what is understood by the term ‘global community’.

Historical perspective-Anatomy down the ages in Australasia; lessons for the future.

Is anatomy a dying discipline? This article explores the history and current state of human anatomy in Australasia, and considers the changing nature of the discipline, and possibilities for the future. A web-based search of all tertiary institutions in Australasia was performed to identify which taught anatomy. Those identified were invited to provide further information about postgraduate student numbers, external courses and public outreach. Forty-one institutions across Australasia teach anatomy. There are seven identifiable anatomy departments and nine disciplines of anatomy. From 1900 to 2014, the number of medical schools has increased (from 4 to 20), however a concomitant increase in the number of anatomy departments (2014, n = 7) was not observed. Twenty-one institutions, without medical schools, currently teach anatomy but none have a stand-alone anatomy department. Anatomy is taught in more than 18 different undergraduate and postgraduate programs. From the 28 institutions that provided current data, 310 postgraduate research students were identified. Predominantly, they came from longer-established institutions with an identifiable anatomy department. Similarly, those with anatomy departments/disciplines offered external professional courses. Many institutions engaged in public outreach. The evidence suggests that anatomy is alive and possibly even growing in Australasia. However, the structures around the discipline and the students who are learning anatomy are changing. Our challenge is to prepare the next generation of anatomy faculty to be both researchers and teachers.

Scientific Dishonesty: A Survey of Doctoral Students at the Major Medical Faculties in Sweden and Norway.

As we need knowledge about the prevalence of scientific dishonesty, this study investigates the knowledge of, experiences with, and attitudes toward various forms of scientific dishonesty among PhD students at the main medical faculties in Sweden and Norway. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed to all post-graduate research students attending basic PhD courses at the medical faculties in Stockholm and Oslo during the fall 2014. The responding doctoral students reported to know about various forms of scientific dishonesty from the literature, in their department, and for some also through their own experience. Some forms of scientific misconduct were considered to be acceptable by a significant minority. There was a high level of willingness to report misconduct but little awareness of relevant policies for scientific conduct.

Research students’ conceptions of the role of information and communication technologies in educational technology research

<p class="abstract"><span lang="EN-GB">The emergence of <em>big data</em>, <em>digital scholarship</em> and <em>eResearch</em> raises the question of how these digital developments in research methods and practices affect research students. This paper presents findings from a phenomenographic study that investigated postgraduate students’ conceptions of the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in research. Ten students conducting research in the broad area of educational technology were interviewed. Three qualitatively different conceptions of ICT in research were identified: complementary, enhancing, and transforming. Results indicate that the three conceptions were closely associated with the expanding students’ focus from seeing ICT as a tool in the researchers’ hands, to noting that digital technologies may have implications for the process of inquiry, to seeing that ICT has distinct generative capacities and changes the nature of research practices. Findings suggest that students’ general understanding of ICT’s potential in research is underpinned not by abstract knowledge, but by their practical experiences of how ICT works and their abilities to see how technologies can enhance researchers’ individual capacities to generate knowledge in specific situations. Some implications for postgraduate research students’ education and capacity building are discussed.</span></p><p class="abstract"> </p>

Postgraduate Research Completion: Student Expectation and Inspiration

This paper focuses on reviewing the literature on postgraduate research students and analysing two selected postgraduate centres/institutions. Three factors are emphasised, student's development in research, the utilisation of support system and student-supervisor relationship. These factors reveal students’ expectations and inspirations are directly related to their ability to develop, consume and comprehend all the three factors. There are at least three findings -the understanding of a student's journey of completion, the identification of support system of postgraduate centres and the supervisors’ approaches. These findings will enable supervisors and postgraduate centres alike to develop a better systematic approach for students.

Supporting the Needs of Higher Educational Learners, through the ‘Postgraduate Pathways'

This paper offers a case study in Adaptive Personalised Learning for Postgraduates within Higher Education: What is already known about this topic: Current State of Higher Education within supporting postgraduate careers and transferable skills Raised standards and improvements within universities expectations required by the QAA Research students and their academic and employability needs. What this paper adds: A postgraduate Recommender Systems for educational pathway to aid with on-line support towards selecting suitable transferable skills depending on departments. Engagement of postgraduate research students and their perception on transferable skills through additional training in Higher Education. Implications for practice: Development of an online postgraduate recommender system, that can guide students on individual modules, courses or programmes to take to benefit them while carrying out there PhD research. Capture a current snap shot of the current trends that the University is facing.

Flexible Pedagogies for Part Time Learners: Guiding the learning journey of part-time postgraduate social science research students

Flexible Pedagogies for Part Time Learners: Guiding the learning journey of part-time postgraduate social science research students

This is Not an Article: a reflection on Creative Research Dialogues (This is Not a Seminar)

This is Not a Seminar (TINAS) is a multidisciplinary forum established in 2012 at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia to support practice-led and practice-based Higher Degree by Research students. The Faculty of Education and Arts at ECU includes cohorts of postgraduate research students in, for example, performance, design, writing and visual arts. We established the TINAS programme to assist postgraduate research students in connecting their creative practices to methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches whilst fostering an atmosphere of rapport across creative disciplines. The pilot programme conducted for six months in 2012 comprised dialogues with experienced creative researchers; critical reading sessions on practice-led theory; and workshops in journaling, ethics and copyright. This article is a reflection on the strengths and limitations of TINAS and future projections. More than an additional teaching and learning service, the programme has become a vital forum for creative dialogue.

Pushing Through Bologna Reforms: The Hungarian Case

Levels of Study There were 1,908 postgraduate research students in the study. Progress rates for postgraduate research students need to be treated with caution, so these 1,908 postgraduate research students, 0.6 percent of the study, were removed from this analysis by level of study. The 16,839 Australian postgraduate coursework (i.e., not postgraduate research) students passed 94.7 percent of courses attempted, the 246,127 Australian undergraduates 89.3 percent. The 22,592 international postgraduate coursework students passed 92.9 percent of courses attempted, the 50,979 international undergraduates 87 percent. Overall, the 39,431 postgraduate coursework students passed 93.7 percent of courses attempted, the 297,106 undergraduates 88.9 percent. Simply, postgraduates did better than undergraduates. The makeup by level of study of the Australian and international cohorts differs: 6 percent of Australian students are postgraduate coursework students, 31 percent of international students are postgraduate coursework students. The international cohort, relatively heavy with postgraduate coursework students, might be expected to outperform the Australian cohort. It is perhaps because of the makeup by levels of study that the research found no difference overall.

Postgraduate Tracking System: Student Research Progress Tracking Tool

The Postgraduate Tracking System (POSTRACKER) has an ambitious goal of providing the ultimate comprehensive students data management and monitoring system for postgraduate research students of an academic institution. The POSTRACKER is completely a unique invention and it is developed to track students’ progress towards graduation (e.g. data on registration, working title, supervisor(s), defence research proposal (DRP), progress to date, Viva-Voce, examiners, deadlines for correction (after Viva-voce), etc.) . This automated tracking system is believed to be effective in monitoring the postgraduate research students’ progress and in reducing the amount of time that students take to graduate. Such information made it possible to see if students are achieving their academic goals and administrator could see, as soon as possible, if a student is not progressing. The POSTRACKER is also useful in helping the postgraduate department to plan their educational activities every semester and improve data communication between administrator and the students. In this way, the progress of the students (both in terms of research outputs and educational activities) is frequently monitored and measures such as counseling will be taken if progress is lacking. Close tracking and monitoring of individual student using POSTRACKER is particularly useful for all postgraduate schools in public and private universities especially when all the universities in Malaysia are heading toward the 4-year Graduate on Time (GoT) Phd program.

Integrity in Postgraduate Research: The Student Voice.

There is a limited understanding of the student perspective of integrity in postgraduate research. This is of concern given that 'research trainees' may have a vulnerable position in formal investigations of research misconduct. This paper analyses qualitative data drawn from an Australian online academic integrity survey in a mixed methods research study. This analysis complements the quantitative survey data analysed earlier and sought to explore factors contributing to postgraduate research students' satisfaction with policy and process, the ways institutions can support students' understandings and practice, suggestions for improving breach processes, and students' concerns. We found that integrity training and modelling of ethical behaviour by staff were key factors contributing to students' satisfaction. Students would have liked more 'hands-on' integrity training, accompanied by consistent and transparent enforcement of policy. Respondents expressed concern about the credibility of research output and educational standards. We call for recommendations from the extensive literature on academic integrity policy and practice to be extended to the postgraduate research sphere.

Enterprise skills and training needs of postgraduate research students

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a survey of postgraduate research (PGRs) students studying at the University of Huddersfield, concentrating on entrepreneurial attributes and the importance of enterprise-related skills future career intentions. Design/methodology/approach – Electronic survey questions asked respondents to rate their confidence in a series of enterprise-related skills, and each skill's importance in their career development. Identification with attributes relating to independence, risk taking, self-efficacy, tolerance of ambiguity, and innovativeness were explored. Further questions probed the importance of enterprise skills development, research impact, and career aspirations including business start-up potential. Findings – Respondents identified with entrepreneurial attributes and were positive towards enterprise skills development. The majority felt that their research could have commercial impact, and over a third reported that starting a business appealed to them. Comparisons of importance and confidence ratings identified skills areas where confidence was relatively low and needed to be improved, where there is a large gap between confidence and importance, and where a skill was rated as having lower importance than is optimal from an institutional perspective. Interestingly, different groups of students considered “self-employment” compared with “business start-up” as a career option. Research limitations/implications – These single-institution results suggest that PGRs are more entrepreneurial than might be expected. Is the higher education (HE) sector underestimating the entrepreneurial potential of the PGR population, their appetite for engaging in enterprise, and their enterprise and commercialisation training needs? Originality/value – The results have relevance for the HE community in terms of understanding PGR entrepreneurial attributes, and training needs for enterprise and commercialisation of research output.

About the cancer research network.

The Cancer Research Network is again very proud to host the biennial Sydney Cancer Conference. I would personally like to thank the SCC2014 conference organising committee, led by Associate Professor Glen Reid and Dr Sonia Yip, for their extremely hard work bringing SCC2014 to fruition and delivering such a diverse and high-quality program. The Cancer Research Network, established in 2006, is a cross-Faculty initiative of the University of Sydney. The Network has been established to link cancer researchers in the University of Sydney and its teaching hospitals and affiliated research institutes and institutions, and thereby help build high quality cancer research capacity and achieve international cancer research excellence in areas of strength. The Network fosters communication with and among members to facilitate research collaboration, with an emphasis on research translation. One of the main aims of the network is to increase awareness of, and capacity for, multidisciplinary collaboration across groups. In the process, this will build a sense of community among cancer researchers across discipline and geographical boundaries. Membership is open to employees of the University of Sydney, people employed by teaching hospitals and Institutes of the University of Sydney, or people holding an academic title award from the University of Sydney, who are active in the area of cancer research, postdoctoral fellows and postgraduate research students enrolled at the University of Sydney. For further information, please contact: Cancer Research Network Office Phone: +61 (0)2 8627 1532 Email: [email protected] Website: sydney.edu.au/cancer-research/

Postgraduate funding: Supplying the future generation of researchers and technicians

Of the 2.5 million students studying at universities in the UK some 30% [500 000 postgraduate taught (PGT) + 100 000 postgraduate research (PGR) students] are studying for a postgraduate degree1, and the decade from 2001 to 2011 saw a 7% year-on-year increase in the number of students registering for postgraduate degrees.

Opening research data: issues and opportunities

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the issues, the role of research data management (RDM) as a mechanism for implementing open research data and the role and opportunities for records managers. The open data agenda is premised on making as much data as possible open and available. However, in the context of open research data there are methodological, ethical and practical issues with this premise. Design/methodology/approach – Two collaborative research projects focusing on qualitative health data were conducted. “DATUM for Health” designed and delivered a tailored RDM skills training programme for postgraduate research students in health studies. “DATUM in Action” was an action research project between researchers from information sciences, health, mathematics and computing, looking at planning and implementing RDM. Findings – Three key issues emerged about what research data is appropriate to make open/accessible for sharing and reuse: re-using qualitative data conflicts with some of the epistemological and methodological principles of qualitative research; there are ethical concerns about making data obtained from human participants open, which are not completely addressed by consent and anonymisation; many research projects are small scale and the costs of preparing and curating data for open access can outweigh its value. In exploring these issues, the authors advocate the need for effective appraisal skills and researcher-focused RDM with records managers playing a useful role. Research limitations/implications – The findings come from two small-scale qualitative projects in health studies. Further exploration of these issues is required. Practical implications – Records managers have new crucial opportunities in the open data and RDM contexts, bringing their expertise and experience in managing a wider range of data and information. They can help realise the benefits of multiple perspectives (researcher, data manager, records manager and archivist) on open research data. Social implications – Researcher-focused RDM offers a mechanism for implementing open research data. Originality/value – It raises complex issues around open research data not found in the records management literature, highlights the need for researcher-focussed RDM and research data appraisal skills and a not yet fully recognised role for records managers.

Problems and Possibilities to Enhance Non-Local Work-Integrated Learning Experience for Postgraduate Design Research

In recent years, postgraduate research students have been more expected to gain knowledge and experience through work-integrated learning. The key advantages of work-integrated learning include non-conventional university support and facility for research. Students can also gain alternative and other in-depth and comprehensive experience in the research area. This off-campus learning also provides opportunities for students to explore other research interests. On the other hand, work-integrated learning has its deficiencies and limitations. Since the learning is conducted outside the university, it is difficult to make arrangement and be available, in particular most of the time not the best available locally. Therefore, work-integrated learning is sometimes necessary to be carried out in remote regions. This situation creates more barriers and un-predictable matters for planning, implementation and management of the learning. To review the needs of work-integrated learning, this paper takes a collaboration of work-integrated learning for postgraduate design research students between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong as a case study. The paper then identifies some key issues and problems. After that, the paper identifies and discusses possibilities for improvement and directions for further investigation.