Designing an Innovative System to Evaluate a Postgraduate Supervision Support and Development Framework

Abstract

The supervision of a doctoral student engages the supervisor/s and the candidate in a professional learning and teaching relationship, described by some as the pedagogy of supervision (Grant, 2005; Nulty, Kiley, & Meyer, 2009). In the past few decades, many universities have developed ‘supervisor training’ programs and other innovations to support supervisors. These programs are designed to cultivate the necessary knowledge and skills to support academic and research staff to supervise postgraduate student(s) (Carton & Kelly, 2014; Carton, O’Farrell, & Kelly, 2013; Luca et al., 2013). As part of a project that was funded by an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) Extension Grant, such a Framework was recently designed and implemented at Avondale College of Higher Education, a small higher education institution in the early phases of postgraduate program development (Petrie et al., 2015). The effectiveness of such initiatives is often difficult to measure in small institutions such as Avondale; the relatively small number of students and supervisors does not always provide the breadth of feedback necessary to evaluate success using traditionally employed evaluation methods. This paper reports on the innovative evaluation system developed as part of this project, using the pedagogy of supervision as a frame of reference to evaluate the Framework. This evaluation process is being undertaken using a design-based research methodology (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) which has guided the construction of evaluation criteria and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of Avondale's Research Training Support Framework. The developed evaluation method and its initial findings will be reported in this paper.