Characteristics of high quality research environments
- Start date: 2006-09-01
- End date: 2007-09-01
- Amount: £29562
- Status: in progress
- Funding Initiative: Higher Education Academy
There are several complementary ways of describing effective postgraduate research environments. Among them are descriptions of those areas (a) where the doctoral students report high levels of satisfaction, (b) where aspects of codes of practice such as those developed by the QAA are thought to be exemplary, and (c) that the departments consider to be providing a high quality research context.
A fourth, and also complementary, way is to describe the doctoral students experience of aspects of the research environment in those departments considered to offer high quality research environments assessed against outcome indicators, such as completion rates and examiners' reports. This project focuses on the fourth way. It builds on research conducted in Australian universities and at the University of Oxford, which shows that students' perceptions of factors such as departmental infrastructure, departmental intellectual climate and supervision, are related to the quality of the desired outcomes of the research. The departments where students experience more supportive intellectual climates and research infrastructures, more supportive supervision, and clearer assessment requirements, are more likely to be the departments where students report greater attainment of research skills, and have faster completion rates and higher Research Assessment Exercise ratings. The project aims to identify the departments where student perceptions suggest a highly supportive environment, and where the relations between perceptions and outcomes are high. These research contexts will then be described in a series of case studies designed to show how (and why) they are perceived to be more supportive and how they differ from contexts that are perceived to be less supportive. This information, when used in conjunction with the descriptions derived from the other sources mentioned above, will provide a means by which research contexts can be changed to enhance the learning of doctoral researchers.
Organisation/Institutions:University of Oxford
University of Sydney