Quality Research Supervision in Some Malaysian Pubic Universities: Supervisees’ Expectations and Challenges
7 Pages Posted: 30 Aug 2010
Date Written: August 29, 2010
Abstract
Malaysian government has newly embarked on upgrading the higher educational system by changing the universities direction towards research and innovation. In 2009, 23% of national budget was allocated for education and more funds were given to five public universities, making them frontiers Malaysian research universities. This quest of government aligned with the national goals of producing high profile human capital. For the public and research universities to achieve this surmountable task, the universities opted for more postgraduate research students locally and internationally to uplift the university standard in research and development. However, some of these postgraduate students (local and international) find difficulty in adjusting to a less deferential working arrangement with their supervisors and less structure in research direction. This research is therefore aims at examining the best practices relevant to quality supervision of postgraduate research students in some Malaysia public universities. The research tends to investigate supervisees’ expectations towards supervision, the problems and challenges faced by supervisees in their research. The results of this study highlight the relationship between quality supervision and students’ expectations. Quality research supervision was measured according to the following aspects: availability of supervisor; Research interest comment and feedback; Research development; Relationship and Motivation. This study adopts quantitative research approach respondents (both local and international) from public Malaysia universities participated in this study and the data were gathered through self-administered questionnaire. The study employs various statistical tools such as Rasch model to validate the instrument and Confirmatory Factor analysis to test the model-fit of the research. ANOVA will be employed to examine differences in respondents’ perceptions amongst selected universities.
Keywords: Supervision, Supervisor, Supervisee, Relationships
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