Mentoring and Supervision Research Paper

Given the scale of these investments and the importance for society of results from research activities using graduate and postdoctoral assistance, it is not surprising that questions arise concerning the roles and responsibilities of graduate students, postdoctoral associates, faculty, and their institutions. The system is showing the strains of increasing numbers as well as mounting calls for accountability from graduate students themselves and the governmental funders and sponsors of graduate education. Graduate students have begun to organize and gain collective bargaining rights on campuses and postdoctoral associates are pushing for national reforms to their status, including written contracts, uniform job title and benefits, support for postdoctoral associations, representation on institutional policy-making committees, and a national postdoctoral organization.

Adequate response to these stresses requires the attention of academic institutions and professional associations. Most important, perhaps, are the responses at the level of departments and programs actually producing new Ph.D.s. The beginnings of change can be seen in the developments described below; but better understanding of changes in mentoring practice and supervision requires systematic research attention, of a kind they have not previously received, in order to identify and assess effects on individuals, departments, programs, and institutions, and to make improvements in the future.

Increased social and governmental attention to questions of research misconduct has given particular impetus for change in this arena. These concerns resulted in new regulations in the USA requiring institutions to establish procedures in response to allegations and many other nations have implemented such procedures. Governmental and academic institutions, as well as scientific and professional associations, regard this as a broader mandate for education in research integrity. In the USA, the National Institutes of Health has established requirements for ethics training for all research staff, which have implications for mentoring and supervision.

Professional associations have been custodians of good practice for their members, as well as for practitioners and researchers who may not be members but draw on the body of knowledge that these associations incorporate, and represent themselves as having the relevant expertise. Today’s world requires that experts work with others with very different specialties more often than in the past; the need for these group or team efforts raises additional issues for good mentoring and supervision and for the effective review of research results.

2. Supervision

The US Council of Graduate Schools issued guidance for supervisory practice in 1990 (Council of Graduate Schools 1990). Recognizing that there are no recipes for the creative impetuses that underlie the most successful interactions between faculty members and students, the brochure provides useful recommendations that can assist departments, programs, and supervisors to enable their students to make good progress. These recommendations are appropriate and can be adapted easily for use with postdoctoral fellows. The guidance indicates that departments should have a clear written framework outlining the stages students are expected to complete in graduate training. Supervisors should help their students plan their time carefully, meet with them regularly, and be ready, at an early stage in the program, to make an assessment, which will be perceived to be fair and appropriate, about whether they should continue towards the Ph.D. Supervisors should engage the students early in research activities, in order to promote knowledge about the field and facilitate the selection of a dissertation topic. In the research endeavors for graduate students, students should discouraged from achieving perfect results at the expense of good research and should not be allowed to become distracted by interesting, but tangential, issues.

In readying students to undertake research, the department or program should clarify the standards it expects students to meet. Will a literature survey be necessary? Will experimental research or fieldwork be required? Are there certain techniques or tools that the student must master in the training program or dissertation? What writing standards must reports and theses meet? In the middle stages of training, graduate students should expect to complete most of the original work that will form the dissertation. Since research may lead in unexpected directions, supervisors and students need to be alert to considerations that might require modifying the original goals, particularly to allow completion of the project in a timely fashion. Careful records need to be kept, and here supervisory assistance and monitoring is most important and lays the foundations for good research practice throughout a career.

Team research may require additional considerations. There needs to be a careful definition of students’ contribution to research work and the students should be given opportunities to demonstrate a broad understanding of project purposes and methods. Of course, students in individual projects also need opportunities for presentation about their status and findings. Writing should begin early in the project. Milestones here are useful. An introduction or overview as well as a list of references can be drafted and revised as work progresses. Questions about interim findings and the relation of the research to the work of others need to be posed so that students can stay abreast of developments in their fields. Experience demonstrates that students should be allowed to complete their dissertations before being asked to continue as a postdoctoral research associate.

2.1 Checklist for Supervisors and Departments

Does the department have a document describing its views on good supervisory practice? What steps exist to make good matches between supervisors and prospective students or postdoctoral associates? Should students and postdoctoral associates present reports for assessment by nonsupervisors early in their tenure? Do they make public presentations satisfactorily? Are adequate meetings scheduled between supervisors and students or postdoctoral associates? Are there regular assessments of progress and background knowledge? Do supervisees and supervisors see the assessment procedures as satisfactory? For students, how are research topics refined early in training? For postdoctoral associates, how are research projects assessed to provide adequate stimulation and chance for advancement? Have appropriate times been scheduled for developing long-term programs of research and for identifying milestones? Do supervisors check research records for accuracy, quality, and completeness?

2.2 Checklist for Students

Have you developed a systematic work-plan and identified major difficulties and relevant references? Are your records in good order, so that you can find the relevant material about a problem you worked on six months ago? Do you have draft portions of any completed aspects of the research? Do others find your written work difficult or easy to understand? Have interim projects, such as figures, tables, or other matter, been identified for preparation during the project?

3. Mentoring

In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences published a handbook for faculty who want to develop good mentoring skills. It points out that mentoring is a personal, as well as a professional, relationship. Good mentors want to help their students get the most from their education, assist their socialization into the field, and aid them in finding employment. Students and postdoctoral associates benefit from having many mentors with different skills and priorities.

Successful mentors today must deal with issues involving ethnicity, culture, sex, and disability. Currently, women account for 42 percent of doctorates earned in the USA, while the number of doctorates earned by US minority group members increased at a faster pace than the total, rising from 9 to 15 percent. Non-US citizens make up about a quarter of the new doctorates. Students may need access to a number of different faculty or graduate student peers for assistance. This may be particularly important when they come from different cultural or minority backgrounds. As faculty advisors, mentors must build mutual respect with their mentees. Besides recognizing how issues of diversity may affect students’ priorities and perceptions, faculty need to recognize that their students are likely to pursue careers outside academe and are legitimately concerned about time to degree and funding for their graduate education.

Junior faculty are also often in need of mentoring. They have the stresses created by considerably increased responsibilities for teaching and research and for professional service. Departments can establish numerous, albeit simple, ways to ease this transition, through appropriate workshops or by encouraging senior faculty to pair with junior colleagues. Departments can provide clear written guidance about tenure requirements and teaching policies and facilitate the acquisition of necessary resources for research, as well as nonresearch resources, such as childcare, which may be very important for entering faculty. They should arrange for frequent feedback and evaluation. Minority and women faculty in particular may need protection from demands on their time created by the lack of others of their race or gender in their departments.

Students and postdoctoral associates often need assistance in mapping out career plans and in being introduced to contacts that may be able to help them. Students should be reminded that prospective employers also expect candidates to have other skills in addition to their competence in a chosen research field. Sometimes, mentors might need to provide frank and honest advice that identifies weaknesses, but also indicates areas of strength which mentees could develop. Over the course of the training, areas of weakness can also be corrected. Practice at teaching or making presentations, for instance, or critiques of draft grant proposals and resumes as well as research reports offer opportunities for improvement. Areas of strength might provide the basis for a good letter of recommendation from the mentor to the appropriate potential employer.

There are many ways that departments and institutions can improve the quality of mentoring, all requiring systematic and on-going attention. Departments and institutions can track the progress of former students for information about careers. They can collect other relevant data or ask advanced students to assess how well their mentors or others have contributed to their progress. Institutions can schedule special activities and provide instructions on mentoring for new faculty and advisors. They can monitor faculty abuses and take a more active role in selecting faculty for advisory roles. They can provide workshops and discussions for students. They can encourage electives and other classes to broaden skills of students and postdoctoral associates.

All discussions of good mentoring and supervisory practice indicate that attention to these matters is imperative if trainees are to emerge with an intellectual and ethical framework that promotes research integrity and with some degree of satisfaction with their training experiences. Supervisors and mentors transmit to their students many of the attitudes and information needed to carry out significant research and good teaching and to practice responsible research. Faculty must recognize the need for human relationships to be built on respect and trust, as well as the special issues that the vulnerability of trainees raise.

In selecting mentors, students need to consider their publication records and national recognition, history of finding support for trainees, availability during the period of the student’s training, prior training record and positions of recent graduates, practices of recognition for student accomplishments, and laboratory or other research arrangements. Students and post-doctoral associates should also recognize that mentors have different personalities. Some are take an active interest and become involved in student projects; some are disengaged; some may develop friendships with their mentees. Each can pose difficulties for both parties. Open communication needs to be encouraged so that issues and potential misunderstandings can be clarified and any changes that might be necessary can be initiated in timely fashion.

To produce good work, mentors and trainees also need to be educated in the research standards of their fields. They need to be familiar with relevant codes of ethics. In experimental work, standards of laboratory practice or laboratory safety need to be discussed. This also holds true for standards of fieldwork and survey practice. Regulatory requirements concerning animal and human subjects need to be well understood. Standards for ethical practice of human subjects research include matters of privacy and confidentiality, consent, and community protection. With regard to research in the social and behavioral sciences, complex questions concerning deception or stigmatization of individuals or communities may need particular care, especially in the context of research on vulnerable populations in other cultures. All should be familiar with definitions of research misconduct and the policies of their program and institution. Students must be trained in responsible use of statistical methods, where appropriate, and in the importance of stewardship of records and data, as well as in respect for ownership of ideas and intellectual property. Standards for responsible authorship and peer review also need to be understood and discrepancies that may exist between different fields need to be examined. These are areas where departments and institutions as well as professional associations and scientific societies have much to offer.

4. Conclusion

For persons in academic research environments to achieve good results, they require and deserve assurance that others will do their share and that they will be protected if difficult problems arise. To foster this ethic, graduate departments or groups should develop adequate written statements of the terms of graduate study, including policies about conflict of interest, and should assign necessary duties to individual faculty members. These statements should be distributed to trainees. Individual faculty often have responsibilities for the admission of students, which allows them to assume similar responsibilities for advising students and postdoctoral associates and for placing graduate students in postdoctoral positions and jobs. Tasks that can help graduate students and postdoctoral associates succeed—such activities as writing proposals or research reports—can also be shared among faculty, as can assignments for making students aware of ethical aspects of research and professional activities.

Departments should create systems that specify advisors’ duties and methods for evaluating their performance. Recent publications and guidance from national bodies and professional associations, as well as books and articles by individual scholars, can be helpful in developing materials and activities responsive to the needs of new faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. Training for advisors will be needed. Increased attention to structural reforms and ethical research practice might also lead to the diminution of research misconduct.

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