Supervising postgraduate students - strategies for departments and supervisors

Authors: Compiled by Leonie Elphinstone, edited by Elaine Martin and Elizabeth Foster

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University

Keywords: Post graduate studies, supervision

Article style and source: Moderated

Contents

• Advice and strategies at departmental level
  • Recruiting and selecting students
  • Allocating supervisors
  • Providing guidelines
  • Providing accommodation and access to departmental office facilities
  • Orientation program
  • Selecting the topic
  • Giving advice about how to do research
  • Meetings with students
  • Helping students to write
  • Maintaining a working relationship
  • Checking progress
  • Introducing students to scholarly networks
  • Ensuring acceptability of the thesis
  • Selecting examiners
• Strategies and suggestions for individual supervisors
  • How the supervisory relationship will operate
  • Identifying Students at Risk
  • Establishing supervisory boundaries
  • Clarifying your role
• Select references

Advice and strategies at departmental level

The following strategies have been found to be effective for assisting postgraduate students at the departmental or faculty level. This information is perhaps most successful if it is provided in a written format for regular and ready access by students.

Recruiting and selecting students

• Develop a departmental/faculty policy on the optimum size of the postgraduate program, on preferred recruitment practices, and on the authority of individual supervisors to recruit students.
• Provide a departmental statement of minimum standards of scholarship, technical expertise and language competence required for admission to candidature.

Allocating supervisors

• qualifications and experience required to be a supervisor.
• workload allocation for supervision.
• number of supervisions that might be undertaken at any one time by a staff member.
• appropriate development opportunities for new supervisors.

Providing guidelines

• academic mission.
• research achievements.
• teaching focus.
• disciplinary culture.

Provide information about:

• activities in the department that can support social and intellectual networks.
• departmental grievance procedures.
• facilities, resources, administrative support and services provided by the university.
• minimum levels of input that supervisors can be expected to make to PhD students, covering a range of areas such as `selecting a topic' or `providing career support'.

Providing accommodation and access to departmental office facilities

• photocopying
• telephones/facsimile/email
• computing
• technical support/equipment
• laboratory space
• office/mail/typing
• tea/coffee
• a place to study
• paid work
• funding/research grants

Orientation program

• outline of the expectations of the research they are undertaking
• opportunity to meet other postgraduate students
• opportunity to meet academic, administrative and technical staff of the department or faculty
• outline of the equipment and facilities available within the department for postgraduate students
• introduction to some of the issues and common problems associated with research work and common strategies for overcoming these.

Selecting the topic

• how topics are usually selected in the department.
• constraints on the research able to be undertaken in the department, such as financial or other resource constraints, external grant restraints on the availability of staff (including those caused by periods of leave).

Giving advice about how to do research

• Develop a forum of supervisors in the department to discuss the kinds of advice they give to students about their work, and about how to follow up advice to students.
• Provide opportunities for PhD students to obtain specialist support for the development of skills in areas such as thesis writing, computing and data analysis, library searching and the management of data bases and archival material.

Meetings with students

• appropriate profile of research students within the department.
• desired frequency of meetings.

Helping students to write

Maintaining a working relationship

Checking progress

• Develop a statement of departmental expectations about the expected rate of progress of students.
• Develop a departmental policy on responsibilities for monitoring the progress of students where co-supervision occurs and ensure that prior agreement has been reached about the distribution of responsibilities.
• Provide supervisors with guidelines about how to deal with questionable progress or disputes about advice during supervision.

Introducing students to scholarly networks

• Develop a departmental policy on the amount of financial assistance which can be provided for support in making contacts with scholars in the field.
• Provide mechanisms whereby students are actively encouraged to participate in intellectual exchange with other scholars, such as participation in conferences, colloquia and seminars.

Ensuring acceptability of the thesis

• Ensure that students understand that submission with the supervisor's approval does not guarantee acceptance of the work by examiners.
• Ensure that supervisors encourage the full use of support services and agencies to assist students with writing, grammar and mastery of the discourse.
• Develop a checklist of administrative procedures within the department on the steps supervisors should take before certifying that a thesis is acceptable for submission.

Selecting examiners

• Develop a departmental policy on how and whether students should be consulted about the range of potential examiners.
• Provide clearly defined appeals procedures for staff and students.

Strategies and suggestions for individual supervisors

Different students will want and require different types and amounts of interaction, assistance, feedback and direction from the beginning and at different stages. Some students may be able clearly to articulate their needs and limitations from the beginning and this may assist you to work with them.

Throughout the process of the research project the relationship will change. You may notice that at some stage the rational, happy students you started supervising become anxious and angry. They may have periods when they seem quite irrational and unresponsive to suggestion and guidance. It must be noted that this research you are supervising is almost certainly the biggest and most important piece of academic work the student has ever undertaken, and may ever undertake. The students' desire for ultimate success and the many problems which appear along the way frequently make life a strain for student and supervisor alike.

Conflict and strong disagreements are not uncommon in supervisory relationships, but these can be an important part of the development of the research student's independence. For some students, it is the path to becoming an equal or to developing a collegial relationship with the supervisors. Such times will be easier to weather if a good working relationship has been established initially and clear ground rules developed.

The following section provides an outline of some common issues which could be clarified in the first meetings between the student and supervisor. Students will rarely have thought through these issues and, therefore, will need to be given time to consider them before committing to a certain position.

If more than one supervisor is involved it may be appropriate that all are involved in discussing this interaction with the student in relation to some of these areas.

How the supervisory relationship will operate

Supervision

• What does supervision mean?
• What are the stages to go through in the process?
• What are the student's and supervisor's responsibilities?
• What is involved in the development of a research proposal?
• What sort of feedback will the supervisor give: how often, how much, what form?
• What sort of feedback does the student prefer/benefit from, find helpful/unhelpful?
• What research skills, statistical analysis or other technical skills are required for the research?
• Is a research methods subject applicable/advisable? How does a student enrol in such a subject?
• What can be done if there is conflicting feedback between supervisors/consultants/others?
• Who has the ownership of material arising from the research, authorship of papers etc.?

• What does thesis/project mean?
• What is the appropriate length, structure, and presentation? (A student should be encouraged to look at other theses/projects in the discipline.)

• Frequency, duration and location of meetings?
• Access to supervisor outside scheduled meetings?
• Whose responsibility is it to schedule meetings?
• If someone cannot attend a scheduled meeting, what should be done?
• What will be the structure of the meetings?

• Stages of the research process (rough guide to the time which might be allowed for each).
• The writing process, supervisors' expectations, preferred style, when to begin.
• Keeping up with relevant research in the field. Habits which may be established to ensure this.
• What would be a realistic completion date to aim for, given all the information discussed?
• University requirements

• Check on students' English expression skills early in the process and refer them for assistance if necessary.
• Ensure basic referencing skills are acquired early.
• If possible, require submission of word processed material.
• Encourage task-orientated student support groups which may assist each other with the editing process.
• Give detailed feedback by using one or more pages of students' work. Too much feedback becomes overpowering and discourages students from learning the principles which underpin the corrections.
• Indicate to supervised students at the beginning your approach to analysis and to feedback on their written work.

Identifying Students at Risk

Students also experience role conflict, often because of paid work commitments or family responsibilities. It is helpful to know something about the students' background and commitments from the beginning as this will aid you in understanding their problems. Below are some possible areas of difficulty and strategies for helping.

Unwillingness to commit to a research topic or continually changing direction after an initial period of exploration.

• It may be necessary to discuss what the students' aims and goals are with regard to the research topic. Sometimes it will be necessary for a student consciously to let go of other options. Some students may need one or two sessions with a counsellor to enable them to do this and to move on, recognising that they cannot do it all now.

• Encourage the student to make notes, no matter how brief. If they have difficulty with that, suggest that they write about the writing process (i.e. what they feel about the project, their frustrations, etc.). Encouraging them to start writing in a section which may be relatively straightforward may also help. If they appear fearful of your reaction to the quality of their writing, suggest that they show it to some fellow students first.

• If you agree with a student in the initial stages on the frequency of meetings, and the student then cancels an arranged meeting, contact the student to indicate your concern and set a new meeting time. Insist on seeing the student and emphasise at this meeting that you need to communicate regularly.
• It is worthwhile to reiterate that the purpose of the meeting is to help the student to progress and that lack of progress is a cause for mutual concern which is not alleviated by avoiding discussion.

Establishing supervisory boundaries

Clarifying Your Role

Select references

McDonald, F. 1993, Women in postgraduate study at RMIT. Office for Prospective Students, RMIT: Unpublished Report.

Martin, E. and Jackling, N. 1993, The needs and expectations of postgraduate research supervisors at RMIT. RMIT: CADU Publication.

Parry, S. & Hayden, M. 1993, 'Quality in the supervision of candidates for higher degrees by research: Disciplinary perspectives.' Paper presented at the Improving Supervisory Practice in Research Degrees, Education-Perspectives from the Disciplines Conference. La Trobe University, Bundoora, July.

About the author

Email: elmart@rmit.edu.au

ultiBASE is grateful for the opportunity to publish the above extracts from The RMIT 'Manual for supervisors of postgraduate students', revised edition, Office of the Director of EQARD.