Despite the importance of the PhD viva in assessing the quality of doctoral research, how examiners approach the PhD viva remains underexplored in the Global South. This study fills this gap by investigating the conceptions of doctoral examiners in Malaysia, shedding light on how they approach the PhD viva and what they believe its key purposes…

Undergraduate research (UR) provides a sound academic foundation for student's personal and professional development. This study aims to provide understanding and investigate the best UR mentoring practices of university professors from various institutions and disciplines. A total of 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed using…

The purpose of doctoral education is not only to produce a thesis but also to develop graduates who are highly competent in research, publications and the norms and values of being a researcher. Only a handful of studies have examined early-career academics' perceptions of doing research at the doctoral level. This exploratory qualitative study…

Discourse regarding modern doctoral studies criticises the traditional notion of doctoral education as being too narrow to facilitate knowledge creation and transfer towards the knowledge economy. This study considered the pedagogical links to supervisory practices to enable transformative learning experiences. The study, grounded in the…

The alignment of student-supervisor expectations in doctoral research builds a foundation for strong supervisory relationships. While some expectations around research practice and outputs are clearly stated and regulated, the expectations concerning personal aspects of supervisory relationships are seldom voiced. To address this gap, this article…

This study aims to get a deep understanding of the causes, effects, and remedies of information overload (IO) phenomenon among postgraduate scholars in the era of advanced internet technology. In-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews and focus group interviews were implemented. Majority of the participants in this study exposed that IO…

Supervision is intrinsic to institutional-based research projects as it acts as a catalyst for the successful execution and completion of said projects. If students are to be independent in research and learning, they need to experience a supervision approach that supports their engagement in learning dialogues alongside their supervisors. This…

At postgraduate level, success often depends on the ability to produce quality academic writing. To develop a framework to support postgraduate research writing, we explored the writing experiences of twenty-four postgraduate students from non-native English-speaking backgrounds. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with these participants,…

Purpose: Assessment rubric often lacks rigor and is underutilized. This article reports the effectiveness of the use of several assessment rubrics for a research writing course. In particular, we examined students' perceived and observed changes in their Chapter One thesis writing as assessed by supervisors using an existing departmental rubric…

This study was conducted to investigate the difficulties encountered by undergraduate ESL students in writing the introduction section of their project reports. Five introduction sections of bachelor of arts students, majoring in English language, were analyzed and a lecturer was interviewed regarding the areas of the students' weaknesses. Swales'…

Malaysia aspires to become a regional and international hub of higher education through an international student mobility initiative. Existing scholarly work on international students is skewed towards understanding the general challenges faced by international students, but limited work has been conducted in exploring the impact of severe…

Research competencies are pertinent to academic researchers. Due to increasingly demanding work situations, academic researchers are forced to rapidly develop competencies in both qualitative and quantitative research. However, studies on how doctoral candidates develop competencies to complete their PhD theses are limited. This study, therefore,…

In order to build and empower human capital development, the Malaysian Ministry of Education devised a plan referred to as "MyBrain15". Under this plan, Malaysia hopes to produce a total of 60,000 doctoral degree holders by 2023. However, high attrition and low completion rates among postgraduate students to date have hindered the noble…

The use of an effective supervision mechanism is crucial between a student and supervisor. The essential knowledge shared and transferred between these two parties must be observed and understood very well in order to ensure that students are produced at good level of quality for future professional knowledge workers. The aim of this study was to…

When undergraduates work with college faculty on complex research projects, the students are often asked to take on the role of "secondary-level" gatherers of data. This can be legitimate: the students have no graduate training and the faculty mentor is more experienced in research design and analysis. This study, however, offers an…