This part-reflective, part-conceptual article focuses on the issue of supervision models and the need to move away from the dominance of the traditional master-apprentice model which continues to persist in many social sciences and humanities contexts. Drawing on communities of practice theory, I critically reflect on my own PhD supervision…

While the interpersonal nature of the supervisory relationship in research degree supervision has been recognised and different models of supervisory styles have been developed, the research supervision literature has yet to acknowledge the relational individual differences and the relational dynamics that are at play within the…

Studying the factors that influence the quality of physics Ph.D. students'doctoral experiences, especially those that motivate them to stay or leave their programs, is critical for providing them with more holistic and equitable support. Prior literature on doctoral attrition has found that students with clear research interests who establish an…

Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one…

The traditional apprenticeship model of supervision in which the single scholar charts her individual research path is giving way to more collaborative learning environments. Doctoral programmes, in which communities of scholars work together, have become increasingly common. This study interrogated how being part of such a community enables the…

Problem-solving strategies learned by physics undergraduates should prepare them for real-world contexts as they transition from students to professionals. Yet, graduate students in physics-intensive research face problems that go beyond problem sets they experienced as undergraduates and are solved by different strategies than are typically…

Using a mixed-methods approach, this study sought to understand a general sense of paradigm confidence and to see how this confidence relates to doctoral student identities as emerging scholars. Identity development was explored among 46 education doctoral students at a midsized public university in the Southeast. Researchers examined students'…

This paper contributes to consideration of the role of conceptual frameworks in the doctoral research process. Through reflection on the two authors' own conceptual frameworks for their doctoral studies, a pedagogical model has been developed. The model posits the development of a conceptual framework as a core element of the doctoral…

Research and enquiry skills are increasingly required of students at all levels of the higher education curriculum, and this requires a sophisticated pedagogical response. The question is: how can we integrate current knowledge about academic writing with current knowledge about supervision? This article integrates different approaches to writing…

Contemporary research models are becoming increasingly transdisciplinary (TD), multilevel, community-connected, and bent on expediting the movement of research to impact. This requires not only fresh thinking about the science of social work but an educational architecture that fosters both cross-disciplinary understanding of complex underlying…

This article argues that alternate models of doctoral research teaching and learning pedagogy could address the challenge of under-productivity of doctoral graduands in the South African higher education system. Present literature tends not to focus on the models of research teaching and learning as a form of pedagogy. The article presents a case…

It is important to understand the thought patterns of students and supervisors that underlie the choice of paradigm and determine the progression of doctoral studies as an integral part of articulating scholarship at the doctoral level and subsequently, to completing the research. This paper traces a student's and a supervisor's thought patterns…

Purpose: Doctoral candidates are now located within a research context of performativity where the push to successfully complete in a timely manner is central. The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of completion mindset within a completion context to assist research students and supervisors. Design/methodology/approach: The research was…

In this overview, I comment on the strong theme of the need to define and improve the quality of doctoral education in marriage and family therapy that pervades the three essays. Deficits in research training are the central concern, although the essayists take different perspectives on the nature of the research training needed. The different…

Despite the growing body of research on doctoral education, little is known about how doctoral students learn to do research across the disciplines. Even though there is a lack of empirical research on the pedagogy of research in doctoral education, much of the literature anecdotally and metaphorically attributes students' learning to traditional…