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…

International policy changes that have prioritised increasing growth in the numbers of doctoral students have led to wide-ranging debate about the changing purpose of the doctorate. However, there has been little research aimed at investigating doctoral supervisors' views of the purpose of the doctorate, despite the significant role supervisors…

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'…

Existing literature suggests that a particular learning challenge for some doctoral candidates is coming to an understanding the concept of theory, that is the use of theory to frame research as well as theorising findings. The concept of theory has been identified as a Threshold Concept taking into account the characteristics of these concepts…

Much international doctoral learning research focuses on personal, institutional and learning support provided by supervisors, managed relationships,"nudging" robust, conceptual, critical, creative work. Other work focuses on stresses experienced in supervisor-student relationships and doctoral journeys. Some considers formal and…

The development of cultures of support has become important in programmes for the preparation of research students. The paper draws on in-depth interviews with 21 research education coordinators from Australian and United Kingdom institutions to identify the strategies that they use to build research cultures and integrate research students into…

The literature on teaching research methods to social work students identifies many challenges, such as dealing with the tensions related to producing research relevant to practice, access to data to teach practice-based research, and limited student interest in learning research methods. This is an exploratory study of the learning experiences of…

The increase in online graduate programs and the online mentoring of student research have led to the need to identify challenges faced by online mentees and successful strategies used by online mentors during the dissertation process. Based on semistructured interviews with ten graduates, strategies for online mentoring and areas of support…

Recent reforms in higher education have provided material for researching different aspects of doctoral studies in a variety of ways. Much of the current literature concentrates on characteristics of effective supervision and doctoral students' experiences. Less attention has been paid to the study experiences of non-completers--former doctoral…

In the past decade, thousands of Chinese doctoral students received funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) to start a 1--2-year exchange study in European universities. Do these Chinese doctoral students significantly improve their academic skills and publications through such an overseas experience? What are the influencing factors for…

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…

This study explores learner experiences regarding skills acquisition of a cohort of engineering doctoral students enrolled in a New Zealand university. Employing a qualitative methodology, we interviewed 28 PhD students about the range of experiences and exchanges that comprised their pathways to skill acquisition. Students reported that research…

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…

The professional identity of a counselor educator develops primarily during the individual's doctoral preparation program. This study employed consensual qualitative research methodology to examine the phenomenon of professional identity development in counselor education doctoral students (CEDS) in a cohort model. Cross-sectional focus groups…