The research experience of postgraduate students: a mixed-methods study

Research experience is widely used in quality assurance exercises to benchmark postgraduate education at the institutional level. However, individual differences in students' research experience have been largely neglected. Furthermore, little is known about how differences in students' research experience are associated with skill development and overall satisfaction. This study addressed these gaps using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Study 1 was a quantitative study that involved surveying 590 research postgraduate students (i.e. 421 PhD and 168 MPhil students). A person-centered approach, specifically latent profile analysis, was used to analyze the data. Our findings revealed that students could be divided into three groups based on their research experience: rewarding, ordinary, and unsatisfactory. Those with a rewarding research experience experienced greater development in their skills and higher levels of satisfaction, while those in the unsatisfactory group demonstrated the worst outcomes. Study 2 was a qualitative study that involved interviews with 10 PhD students. The qualitative findings largely triangulated the quantitative results but also uncovered emerging themes, including the importance of student-supervisor misfit, publication pressure, and the COVID-19 pandemic context. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

The research experience of postgraduate students: a mixed-methods study

Research experience is widely used in quality assurance exercises to benchmark postgraduate education at the institutional level. However, individual differences in students' research experience have been largely neglected. Furthermore, little is known about how differences in students' research experience are associated with skill development and overall satisfaction. This study addressed these gaps using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Study 1 was a quantitative study that involved surveying 590 research postgraduate students (i.e. 421 PhD and 168 MPhil students). A person-centered approach, specifically latent profile analysis, was used to analyze the data. Our findings revealed that students could be divided into three groups based on their research experience: rewarding, ordinary, and unsatisfactory. Those with a rewarding research experience experienced greater development in their skills and higher levels of satisfaction, while those in the unsatisfactory group demonstrated the worst outcomes. Study 2 was a qualitative study that involved interviews with 10 PhD students. The qualitative findings largely triangulated the quantitative results but also uncovered emerging themes, including the importance of student-supervisor misfit, publication pressure, and the COVID-19 pandemic context. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Supporting students’ intrinsic motivation for online learning tasks: The effect of need-supportive task instructions on motivation, self-assessment, and task performance

Self-determination theory argues that students' intrinsic motivation is cultivated when teachers teach in ways that meet students' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (i.e., need-supportive teaching). However, the suspension of in-person teaching and learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic has urged teachers to search for strategies to practice need-supportive teaching online. This study tested the effect of need-supportive task instruction on students' situational intrinsic motivation in an online language learning task. We also examined whether the ensuing intrinsic motivation on the task would positively predict task performance directly or indirectly through self-assessment practice. Controlling for pre-test situational intrinsic motivation, secondary school students randomly assigned to the need-supportive task instruction (n = 56) showed significantly higher situational intrinsic motivation than those in the control group (n = 50). The need-supportive task instructions had a medium effect size on intrinsic motivation. Although such intrinsic motivation had no direct effect on task performance, it yielded significant indirect effects via self-assessment practice. Post-hoc moderated mediation analysis demonstrated that the indirect effect of intrinsic motivation on task performance was specific to students in the need-supportive task instruction group. Overall, need-supportive statements embedded in task instructions generated increased intrinsic motivation on an online task. As schools transition to the new normal of education, this study presents a unique opportunity for educators to implement theoretically informed, brief, and sustainable interventions to support students' motivation and learning online.

Measuring and Promoting Self-Regulation for Equity and Quality of Online Learning: New Evidence from a Multi-Institutional Survey during COVID-19

Self-regulation is a core concept to understand the metacognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects of learning. The outbreak of COVID-19 resulted in large numbers of courses being shifted online, thus providing a large-scale setting to collect new empirical evidence to shed light on the specific challenges that different learner subgroups struggle with in the authentic online learning environment and then to provide practical implications to improve the learning outcomes by promoting learners' online self-regulation. Based on a survey of 64,949 participants enrolled at 39 universities in a metropolitan city of China during the pandemic, we developed the Undergraduate Online Self-regulated Learning Questionnaire (UOSL), tested the reliability and construct validity of the UOSL items, and then built regression models to estimate the associations between online self-regulation and mastery of eight skills across different subgroups in a diverse student body. Disadvantaged subgroups such as rural, first-generation college students reported significantly lower UOSL scores as well as lower skill mastery in online learning. After controlling self-regulation in the regression model, these gaps related to student demographics have shrunk substantially and some become statistically insignificant (e.g., the gender gap in online skill mastery). The findings highlight the critical role of the targeted interventions of self-regulation to promote equity and enhance quality in the online teaching design and learning support.

COVID-19 Increases Online Searches for Emotional and Health-Related Terms.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has powerfully shaped people's lives. The current work investigated the emotional and behavioral reactions people experience in response to COVID-19 through their internet searches. We hypothesised that when the prevalence rates of COVID-19 increase, people would experience more fear, which in turn would predict more searches for protective behaviors, health-related knowledge, and panic buying. METHODS: Prevalence rates of COVID-19 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia were used as predictors. Fear-related emotions, protective behaviors, seeking health-related knowledge, and panic buying were measured using internet search volumes in Google Trends. RESULTS: We found that increased prevalence rates of COVID-19 were associated with more searches for protective behaviors, health knowledge, and panic buying. This pattern was consistent across four countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Fear-related emotions explained the associations between COVID-19 and the content of their internet searches. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that exposure to COVID-19 prevalence and fear-related emotions may motivate people to search for relevant health-related information so as to protect themselves from the pandemic.