2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This empirical research work-in-progress paper explores the bi-dimensional nature of the graduate research training experience.

Many studies pertaining to the growth and development of graduate students focus on supervision (i.e., the role of the supervisor). Others, although much less frequently, consider the link between graduate student outcomes and the research community. However, these two dimensions—supervision and research community—are rarely considered together. Moreover, supervision and research community are defined and measured in very different ways across the studies. For example, the research community can refer to the wide range of people and organizations that graduate students interact with. In engineering, the first (immediate) circle of a graduate student’s research community is the research group, which comprises students supervised by a faculty member. Research groups are typically organized around the supervisor’s domain of expertise, and students work in a shared laboratory or space. While the overall experience of graduate students can involve many factors, including social, cultural, and institutional contexts, supervision (the supervisor) and the research group are key dimensions of the research training experience in engineering.

This research work-in-progress seeks to demonstrate that the graduate research training experience is bi-dimensional. In particular, while interconnected, experiences with supervision and the research group can both contribute independently to shedding light on the growth and development of graduate students.

After reviewing different concepts and measures of supervision and the research group, we conduct a statistical analysis of original survey data to explore how supervision and the research group experiences relate to one another and to explain the development of research skills, self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging to the professional community. Survey responses were collected from 157 graduate engineering students from 12 mid to large size Canadian R1 and R2 universities. We also compare how the measures of supervision and research group experiences vary for different sub-groups of students.

The low to moderate correlation between responses to the survey questions on the supervisor and the research group suggest that the research training experience is indeed bi-dimensional. Moreover, preliminary results show that both supervision and research group experiences contribute to explain the variance in students’ sense of belonging to the professional community while the role of the supervisor is primarily linked to self-evaluations of research skills.

Our study and preliminary results reveal the separate roles of supervision and research group as essential parts of the graduate research training experience and need to be considered together to better understand the impact on graduate student outcomes.