Grantsmanship is an integral component of surviving and thriving in academic science, especially in the current funding climate. Therefore, any additional opportunities to write, read, and review grants during graduate school may have lasting benefits on one's career. We present here our experience with a small, student-run grant program at…

The purpose of this study was to investigate interactions between two doctoral students and their colleagues in a graduate music education program and determine how a community of peer interactions functions as a resource to prepare music teacher educators. Results of this study showed that peer interactions between two participants and other…

Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, this study examined the factors that influenced Latino/a students' decision to matriculate at a particular doctoral institution. Findings reveal that Latinos/as are influenced by several factors in their selection of a doctoral program, including location (proximity to home), faculty influences, financial…

The underrepresentation of women in physics doctorate programs and in tenured academic positions indicates a need to evaluate what may influence their career choice and persistence. This qualitative paper examines eleven females in physics doctoral programs and professional science positions in order to provide a more thorough understanding of why…

Using faculty narratives, this study identifies factors affecting the occurrence of faculty-doctoral student coauthorship. Norms of the discipline, resources, faculty goals for students, faculty goals for themselves, and institutional expectations emerged as dominant factors. Each factor is explored separately and as part of an interlocking…

This article reports on an exploratory study that examined the transition to independence in Stage 2 of the doctoral student experience in two applied social science fields. We rely on an interdisciplinary framework that integrates developmental networks and sociocultural perspectives of learning to better understand the connection between the…

We examined the relationship between sense of professional identity and academic success among under-represented minority graduate students in a biomedical doctoral program. We found that a sense of professional identity is related to science success among under-represented minority students, but not for non-underrepresented minority students.…

Doctoral student attrition is an issue of great concern among leaders in higher education (Gardner, 2009a). In response to concern for high attrition rates in doctoral programs, several studies (Lovitts, 2001; National Science Foundation, 2004; Nettles & Millett, 2006) investigated this issue aimed at gaining data to address this concern.…

There is a paucity of adult professional education literature, yet there are multiple theories and models from which to extrapolate information regarding learning in this population, including self-regulated learning theory and adult learning models. The first aim of this study was to explore these bodies of literature and provide a compelling…

This paper explores PhD students' perceptions of their entrepreneurial and commercial capabilities, their attitude towards university supports and the extent to which they engage in external collaboration. The study concentrated on current PhD researchers at one university in Ireland as a unit of analysis and provides encouraging evidence from the…

In this presentation I will share some reflections on how I have dealt with methodology design in the early stages of my PhD candidature leading up to data collection. I will particularly focus on the dilemmas that I have encountered so far as I search for a methodology that would allow me to ethically report on the educational experiences of…

Reflective tools have been gaining ground in educational research. Diaries, especially electronic ones, can be effective in enabling researchers to organise and reflect upon their research. Online diaries are flexible Web-based facilities since the recording process can be conducted quickly and smoothly. Here, I report on using Yahoo! Notepad as…

The challenges involving doctoral non-completion and a lack of academic or scholarly quality are not restricted to putting the blame on doctoral candidates themselves, their supervisors or the institutions where they enrol. As candidates carry huge responsibilities when entering doctoral studies, success can be associated with an array of factors…

Debates about the education doctorate continue; and, while some individuals focus on the problematic, others work to distinguish this degree from the Ph.D. The author is part of the latter, and in this article I explain how faculty members at one university are using action research as a signature pedagogy to create stewards of practice, that is,…

The present study of Doctoral PETE programs provided an extensive description of demographic data which included: (a) doctoral program characteristics, (b) faculty, and (c) doctoral graduates. Several data sets from the academic years of 2005-06 and 2008-09 as well as selected summary data from 1996-97 through 2008-09 were used to make comparisons…