The Development of Pedagogical Skills in PhD Candidates Through Supervision of Master Projects

Abstract

Teaching and research are two pillars of the academic activity and therefore also
integrative parts of the education of doctoral students. A majority of the PhD
students have in fact teaching duties, be it as laboratory assistants or as Master
student tutors. There is, however, a lack of formal education for doctoral
students in the pedagogy of supervision, resulting in a trial-by-fire approach to
teaching. In the current study, we chose to investigate the attitudes of PhD
students at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University towards MSc project
supervision in order to assess the development of pedagogical skills in the
doctoral students. This was done by a case study on the authors’ own
experiences and by a survey sent to PhD students who had supervised at least
one MSc Student. It was found that the experience of the doctoral students
towards MSc supervision was overall on the positive side, but that there was a
desire for increased support from their senior supervisor. To tackle the possible
issues that might arise in the PhD-MSc relationship, we believe that it is
imperative that the departments and research groups work actively towards
creating a microculture in which teaching and pedagogy is part of the ongoing
discussion, and that this eventually will have beneficial effects also on the skillset
and research outcome of the PhD student.