This study focuses on online supervisory written feedback on PhD supervisees' performance, given explicitly through online communication, particularly during the first wave of COVID-19. This unusual situation has brought many different effects on students' academic lives. This scenario has influenced both students' and teachers' mutual…

This paper describes a study investigating the effectiveness of an online group supervision model developed to respond to the plight of postgraduate students forced to complete their research theses in China due to the COVID-19 pandemic border closures in 2020-2022. The supervisory group included academics with variable supervision experience who…

Despite numerous studies demonstrating that authoritarian leadership and benevolent leadership exert incompatible influence on an individual's creativity, the combined effects of authoritarian leadership and benevolent leadership on an individual's creativity and the related mechanisms have yet to be explained. This study tests a model that…

This paper reports on a study that examined the process of two international doctoral students' academic socialisation in Chinese universities. Drawing on the concept of academic socialisation and social network analysis, we analysed multiple types of data, including study-abroad social network questionnaires, concentric circles interviews,…

Internationalisation in higher education is now a worldwide phenomenon but there is little attention paid to internationalisation at doctoral level, although this phenomenon has grown exponentially in recent years. This study focuses on a university in China to examine how international doctoral students and their supervisors perceive supervision…

Digital pedagogy was used as a contingency plan to achieve teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to observe digital pedagogy in lecturers' online teaching practices and instructional supervisors' evaluations of teaching outcomes. A sample of 32 lecturers and instructional supervisors from three Chinese universities…

While higher education (HE) research has long recognized the importance of providing emotional support to doctoral students, empirical inquiries have barely investigated doctoral supervisors' practice from the perspective of extrinsic emotion regulation. The current qualitative study used the framework of extrinsic emotion regulation (Gross 2014,…

Leadership style impacts on the manner and frequency of feedback transmission. However, communication challenges between superiors and subordinates originate from cultural differences, which undermine the usefulness of feedback. The study tested leadership style's effect on self-efficacy through a moderated mediation approach, examined through the…

This book focuses on the topic of academic publishing. It discusses the mounting, serious problems that researchers, particularly new researchers, encounter when trying to publish their research. The book addresses the issues of publishing as well as the salient factors militating against academic publication and the mitigating factors encouraging…

This paper tries to probe the common quality issues in academic master theses of education majors and propose some possible countermeasures. The study sampled and evaluated 275 academic master theses of education majors in China to examine common quality issues in them, and used a questionnaire to survey 210 academic master's degree candidates of…

Due to the internationalisation of higher education, much research has been focused on internationalising the curriculum, while little is known about internationalising research supervision. Research supervision is very pertinent as far as students' acquisition of sustainable research skills is concerned. This study examined the perceptions of…

This study aimed to examine the relationship between organizational justice (OJ), perceived supervisor support (PSS), and affective commitment (AC) among university teachers. 426 teachers from 5 universities of China were sampled to complete the measures. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and bootstrap analysis were employed to test the…

The Chinese government has been actively recruiting foreign-trained Chinese scholars to return to China since the Chinese brain drain began. Japan is among the most popular destinations for Chinese scholars seeking to receive doctoral training. This study explores the factors contributing to the stratification of Japanese-trained Chinese PhDs'…

In Chinese culture the concept of 'face' refers to the "dignity" or "prestige" of an individual that must be protected or saved, particularly in inter-cultural communication. This study aimed to examine how addressers inevitably save their own face in inter-cultural communication and what different strategies of 'face' saving…

This case study shows how three Master's students engage affectively, behaviourally and cognitively with supervisor feedback on thesis drafts. The data sources are students' drafts, supervisor's oral and written feedback, and student interviews. Six themes of student engagement are identified in the data, namely (1) "gaining reassurance from…