The theory of practice architectures is a useful theoretical, methodological and analytical tool for educational research. The use of the theory is emerging as germane in early childhood education research. This article explores concepts from the theory as applied in an early childhood education research project. The article focuses on the concept…

The nature of supervisory relationship is dynamic that changes over the course of candidacy. Subsequently, the supervision demands of supervisees also change to help them in performing certain tasks at specific research stages. In this context, this research is proposed to investigate the supervision experiences of supervisees in four different…

A postgraduate student researcher coming from a context where there is an absence of an active research culture is likely to face several challenges when undertaking doctoral study at a university with a deep-rooted culture of research. They may experience academic writing, researching and thesis structuring struggles, and may specifically…

Digital technologies now form an integral feature of the university student experience and there is a range of studies that explore digital technology use within a higher education context. However, very few of these studies focus on how doctoral students engage with digital technologies. This article aims to throw light on the digital practices…

This paper offers an account of a reflexive "trip" undertaken by a professional doctoral student and her supervisor. It presents a series of vignettes which offer an account of unbecomings and becomings encountered by the student. Making use of a dialogic approach in which the supervisor responds to the student, we suggest this method of…

Supervision of doctoral students needs to be improved to increase completion rates, reduce attrition rates (estimated to be at 25% or more) and improve quality of research. The current literature review aimed to explore the contribution that technology can make to higher degree research supervision. The articles selected included empirical studies…

Because almost one half of students enrolled in American doctoral programs do not complete their degrees, the factors that lead to doctoral student attrition need to be identified. Research suggests that the nature of the advisor-advisee relationship contributes to the persistence levels of doctoral students. In this study, we conducted a content…

Service learning strengthens all involved: Students, faculty members, the community, and higher education institutions. Benefits of service learning for students include gaining real world experiences, personal and transformative outcomes (Conway, Amel, & Gerwien's, 2009), as well as higher order thinking from reflection on the experience…

This section offers a compilation of 16 extended abstracts summarizing research of the doctoral students who participated in the Second Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI 2014) held at Harvard University in July 2014. The abstracts highlight the motivation, main goals and expected contributions to the field from the ongoing learning…

In this paper, we explore the usefulness of three different approaches to facilitating reflexivity and a critical awareness of emerging academic identities for doctoral students. This paper stems from a longitudinal research project entitled "The Next Generation of Social Scientists", which was conducted across three research-intensive…

A qualitative case study research design provided an in-depth perspective of the participants in relation to understanding the holistic impact technology has on the incivility of student-to-student and student-to-faculty interactions in higher education. The conceptual framework by Twale and Deluca (2008), based upon Salin's (2003) proposed model…

Effectively grouping learners in an online environment is a highly useful task. However, datasets used in this task often have large numbers of attributes of disparate types and different scales, which traditional clustering approaches cannot handle effectively. Here, a unique dissimilarity measure based on the random forest, which handles the…

The U.S. system of graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has served the nation and its science and engineering enterprise extremely well. Over the course of their education, graduate students become involved in advancing the frontiers of discovery, as well as in making significant contributions to the…

Although PhD supervision has been recognised as an educative process and a complex pedagogy for decades, there is little research into on-site pedagogic processes. Informed by social constructionism and a Foucauldian approach, this qualitative case study explores how learning opportunities were created by analysing both a supervisor's verbal…

The student full-time equivalent (FTE) measure has a long history in U.S. postsecondary education. Credit hours, contact hours, and their derivative FTE have been used as proxies for both student and faculty effort. FTE ultimately became a core measure for planning, evaluating and assessing human resource allocation within higher education.…