This study aims to explore the role of a doctoral supervisor in doctoral candidates' state of methodological preparedness within a specific disciplinary and institutional context. The number of doctoral graduates per million is commonly used as an indicator of progress to high-level competence and growth, and has become a global policy priority.…

Postgraduate education has grown enormously worldwide, which has led to supervisors being expected to take on a supervisor's role immediately upon graduation. But crossing the border from being a doctoral candidate to becoming a doctoral supervisor entails significant shifts in identity and an understanding of postgraduate pedagogy and…

The University of South Africa's (UNISA) College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) stands unique in the world by offering laboratory-based disciplines through Open Distance Learning (ODL) at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Lack of postgraduate programmes in chemistry at the very few ODL institutions offering undergraduate…

Effective postgraduate supervision is a concern at universities worldwide, even under optimal conditions where postgraduate students are studying full-time. Universities are being pressured by their governments to increase the throughput of postgraduates where there is a need for supervisory guidance in order to produce quality graduates within a…

This study analyses the use of a group space on the social networking site Facebook as a way to facilitate research supervision for teams of learners. Borrowing Lee's framework for research supervision, the goal was to understand how supervision and learning was achieved in, and shaped by, the properties of a social networking space. For this…

Background: This paper reports part of the findings of a study which exposed sexual violence in schools for learners with mild intellectual disability in South Africa. Special attention was paid on factors contributing to such a problem. Methods: Data were collected using focus groups and individual interviews with 16 learners with mild…

The purpose of this study was to investigate formative postgraduate assessment from an international perspective while acknowledging the two countries' differing cultures and environments. Using a case study approach, data were collected from research supervisors of postgraduate work at a university in the United States (USA) and a university in…

Participatory approaches to behaviour change dominate HIV- and intimate partner violence prevention interventions. Research has identified multiple challenges in the delivery of these. In this article, we focus on how facilitators conceptualize successful facilitation and how these understandings may undermine dialogue and critical consciousness,…

Supervision has been identified as an important factor in the success of postgraduate students, even as the most significant variable and a large number of studies have been conducted to identify factors that contribute to supervision success. However the dependent variable in these studies--supervision success--has been an elusive one to define.…

We document the efforts of the faculty of education of a large research-oriented university in supporting doctoral learning. The development of a space for doctoral learning is in line with the need to develop a community of researchers in South Africa. We describe the historical origins of this cohort model of doctoral supervision and support,…

This study is framed by self-efficacy theory (SET). It aimed to determine successful research students' views of supervisory practices they had experienced. The research design was an embedded design. A questionnaire determined the views of 52 students in one college at Unisa on the support they received for successful experiences; the influence…

This investigation elicited the perceptions of thirteen of the most successful research supervisors from one university, with a view to identifying their approaches to selecting research candidates. The supervisors were identified by the university's research office using the single criterion of having the largest number of completed research…

The premise of this article is that the visual arts can provide a valuable tool for social transformation. The application of this role of the arts in community-engaged research has revealed specific challenges for developing broader assessment criteria for evaluation. This article will explore a case study of a Fine Art Masters student's…

This paper explores the feasibility of using a blended approach to postgraduate research-degree supervision. Such a model could reduce research supervisors' workloads and improve the quality and success of Masters and Doctoral students' research output. The paper presents a case study that is based on a framework that was originally designed for…

Discusses problems in the understanding and practice of teacher supervision, particularly resistance to evaluation, in South Africa's historically black schools. These include the judgmental nature of conventional evaluation procedures, lack of acknowledgment of teacher concerns and aspirations, lack of supervisor training, and tendency to…