Authoritarian, laissez-faire or guided: How do different mentoring styles affect master students' research work?

• In Event: Education Policy and Improvement

Proposal

Scientific research is the main way for postgraduate students to produce innovative work, and the method of selecting research topics directly reflects the status of the research rights of postgraduate students and, thus, affects the quality of their scientific research. Through interviews with master’s students in ‘double first-class’ universities in Wuhan, China, we found that the three kinds of mentoring styles, ‘authoritarian’, ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘guided’, have very different impacts on students' research experience and outcome. The ‘authoritarian’ style infringes upon the students' right to autonomy in scientific research and has both advantages and disadvantages to the research outcome. Under the guidance of the ‘laissez-faire’ style, the research experience of graduate students varies from person to person, and the improvement in research ability totally depends on the student's personal quality. With the ‘guided’ style, the research state of students is stable, and the cooperation between teachers and students is efficient. In this study, we present the influence of different mentoring styles on the research work of master’s students and propose improvement suggestions from the perspectives of academic evaluation, tutors, and postgraduates.

Our study aims to assist graduate students, particularly academic master's students, in strengthening their capacity to protect their own rights and resist oppression and authority in the process of research work. This fits with the conference's overall theme. And there are two theoretical frameworks—“three types of mentoring styles” and “two dimensions of supervisor instruction”—are the foundation of our research, which also includes concrete empirical analyses.
This study used interviews to gather information on the specific struggles and opposition graduate students had throughout the research topic selection and tutor guidance. By having a conversation with the interview subjects to get accurate, useful, and in-depth information. And then this study classified the primary interview data that was collected using the grounded theory, and then carried out particular research and analysis using the codes, categories, and themes discovered. The original interview material was incorporated into this article to help explain and analyze the research findings. This indicates that the best interpretation of the findings is provided by the conclusions formed from the data.
This study takes graduate students as the research object, and the research object is relatively novel in this field. In addition, this study starts from research topic selection to explore the status and specific impact of students' scientific research participation under different types of tutor guidance. This is conducive to exploring the research experience of master students under different topic selection methods, and then exploring the subsequent impact of different selection methods on their research careers. It has far-reaching significance to the scientific research and development of graduate students.

Authors

• JUNYING LIU, CHINA UNIVERSITY OF GEOSCIENCES, WUHAN

• Ping Lang, CHINA UNIVERSITY OF GEOSCIENCES, WUHAN