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This study uses metaphor analysis to examine doctoral students’ conceptions obtained from their responses to an on‐line survey. The conceptions examined were the conception of self in research, the conception of the PhD, the conception of knowledge, and the conception of the outcomes of research. The conceptions found were allocated to the categories of “organic”, “spatial”, “explorative” and “constructive”, the same categories as were used in a previous study of the students’ conceptions of research. A number of interesting relationships were found and are discussed, including the relationship of the conceptions to each other and to the demographic data obtained in the survey. Some tentative conclusions are discussed and some speculation indulged in. Since the supervisor/student relationship may be affected by any mis‐match between their conceptions, that mis‐match, if present, will also affect the student’s progress and development.

Although increasing emphasis is placed on the provision of research training for doctoral students, much of the support currently available is generic in nature, rather than tailored to the student’s particular field(s) of study. In this paper, I briefly review UK graduate education for arts and humanities research students, and some of the ways in which the distinctive demands of their discipline(s) shape the research student experience and hence their development needs. I describe the design and delivery of a pilot programme of discipline‐specific research skills development, co‐ordinated by the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, which aims to address such needs; and I evaluate its success. I conclude with some recommendations for future practice; in particular, I argue that doctoral training provision is more effective when it involves a subject‐specific approach in which practising academics from the discipline(s) play a significant role – both in terms of fostering an improved level of student engagement with the programme, and of delivering training and development opportunities which are tailored to the student’s particular context and needs.

Professional Doctorates (PDs) have been added to the curriculum of many universities worldwide, as an alternative to the traditional Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). PDs are more focused on practice-based knowledge that advances professional practice and contributes to society, industry and the economy. The dominance of the PhD as the typical higher degree by research has led universities to develop frameworks for their PDs which are very similar to the PhD framework. This includes the assessment of the PD, which in many cases follows the same process and is based on the same criteria as for the PhD. This similarity in the assessment of the two types of doctorates creates challenges for external examiners (EEs), who are invited to evaluate the contribution of the PD within frameworks which are tailored around the PhD. Here, the authors focus the investigation on the Doctorate in Business Administration and conduct a review and analysis of institutional documents from universities in England in an attempt to understand the similarities and differences between the examination process of the PD and the PhD and the extent to which the examination process of the PD supports the evaluation of the practice-based contribution that is at its heart. Through this review and analysis, the authors identify the challenges that exist for EEs who are called to assess PDs, and make recommendations which will support EEs to evaluate the contribution of the PD.

This paper outlines a doctoral internship programme introduced for students researching Mechanistic Biology in the Department of Biology, University of York, UK. The programme forms part of the White Rose Doctoral Training Programme (DTP), a collaboration between the three “White Rose” Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York in the North of England. It provides an analysis of the UK context in which the new biotechnology doctoral internships initiative sits and describes the pilot phase of the Professional Internship for PhD Students (PIPS) programme and the introduction of the full doctoral PIPS internship programme. The purpose of this paper is to examine best practice in the planning and management of internships with particular interest in doctoral programmes, with a discussion on the challenges presented by cognate and non-cognate internships.

The paper uses as a case study, the introduction of PIPS for the DTP in Mechanistic Biology, hosted by the White Rose Consortium of Universities (York, Sheffield and Leeds) and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). It also considers good practice from around the world, and relates these to the work-based learning literature.

The paper outlines the processes and resources used to secure PIPS internships, and evaluates their success against BBSRC’s objective to help early career researchers to understand the context of their research and expose them to the range of opportunities available after graduation. The authors describe an initial pilot study, challenges and opportunities provided by the internships and feedback from students in the programme.

Though the number of students in the pilot study was very limited, all students had a greater awareness particularly of their leadership, project management, organisational and team working capabilities following the three-month internship and were more receptive to the consideration of careers outside of academia.

The authors offer recommendations from their own experiences of initiating these doctoral internships which may be useful to others implementing non-cognate internship programmes at their own institutions, whilst being mindful that programmes in other countries may face different challenges.

The paper seeks to propose the adoption of an alternative metaphor to that of the “journey”, currently the most pervasive characterisation for the student's experience of doctoral education.

The paper adopts a conceptual and rhetorical approach.

The paper offers a critique of the journey metaphor as a characterisation of the student's doctoral experience and proposes instead the metaphor of the Quest, a cultural and literary form found in most societies. It argues that the six elements of the Quest identified by W.H. Auden resonate with the contemporary doctoral experience and emphasise the uncertainty involved in research rather than the linearity implied by the journey metaphor.

The paper argues that the quest metaphor offers a cross‐cultural basis for both staff and student development activities through which sense can be made of the research experience, student concerns can be surfaced, and potentially difficult issues raised for discussion in an unthreatening way.

The paper is the first to apply the quest as a metaphor for the student's doctoral experience and offers a new way of interrogating that experience which will be of use to those involved in supporting research students.

This study aims to better understand how academics-in-the-making construe doctoral performance and the impacts of this construal on their positioning in relation to doctoral performance expectations.

This study is based on 25 semi-structured interviews with PhD students from Canadian, Dutch, Scottish and Australian business schools.

Based on Decoteau’s (2016) concept of reflexive habitus, this study highlights how doctoral students’ construal is influenced by their previous experiences and by expectations from other adjacent fields in which they simultaneously gravitate. This leads them to adopt a position oscillating between resistance and compliance in relation to their understanding of doctoral performance expectations promoted in the academic field.

The concept of reflexivity, as understood by Decoteau (2016), is found to be pivotal when an individual integrates into a new field.

This study encourages business schools to review expectations regarding doctoral performance. These expectations should be clear, but they should also leave room for PhD students to preserve their academic aspirations.

It is beneficial to empirically clarify the influence of performance expectations in academia on the reflexivity of PhD students, as the majority of studies exploring this topic mainly leverage auto-ethnographic data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of case study-based learning on student’s engagement, learning motivation and learning performance among university students of Pakistan.

The research model is analyzed with structural equation modeling. The analysis is done with the application of the measurement model and the structural model.

The findings revealed that case study-based learning enhances student engagement, and a significant and positive relationship between case-based learning and all four aspects of engagement, i.e. behavioral, emotional, cognitive and agentic engagement, was observed statistically. According to the findings, case-based learning leads toward an understanding of concepts learned in class and the development of skills among students and results in the enhancement of learning motivation. Furthermore, it is suggested by the results that the impact of student engagement on learning performance varies with respect to its different aspects. As among all the four aspects, only agentic engagement was found to be statistically significant in establishing the link with the learning performance of the students.

The mixed findings pertaining to the impact of student engagement’s aspects on learning performance of the students pave the way for future research. The future researchers should incorporate individual traits and the specific context to analyze the relationships between the proposed constructs because students vary in their responses to learning activities.

The present study holds significance for the field of educational research and emphasizes the importance of incorporating case-based teaching in the higher education curriculum in order to ensure the implementation of effective learning strategies. Also, this research will be beneficial for future researchers in understanding the phenomenon of student learning and engagement.

In view of the limited academic literature in the Asian context, the present study extends the findings and examined the impact of case-based learning on student’s engagement, student’s learning motivation and the role of such engagement in enhancing learning performance of university students.

This paper provides a cross-national analysis of PhD supervision models, milestones and examination procedures in order to compare PhD programs and their practices.

A comparative approach is employed, which systematically interrogates PhD supervision models, milestones and examination procedures in the United Kingdom, South Africa and the United States via a comprehensive review of the practices and literature.

The findings indicate the ramifications of the different approaches and highlight the benefits and drawbacks associated with the different models.

By making explicit the dominant supervision models, milestones and examination procedures that exist in the United Kingdom, South Africa and the United States, the authors shed light on the somewhat obscure path to earning a PhD degree.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theoretical and practical need for research into the learning conditions that influence a student’s self-assessment of their competences in management education. By means of a theoretical review, the paper introduces a model that integrates various learning conditions related to a student’s affective learning ability and the role of the teacher that may have an influence on a student’s self-assessment of their competences in the field of management.

The authors describe the analysis of data from questionnaires on the experience of undergraduate students from business administration at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

The results reveal the importance of a student’s motivation for professional development, their self-efficacy as well as the important role of the teacher in a student’s self-assessment of their competences.

The paper fulfils an identified need to study the conditions that influence a student’s self-assessment of their learning.

Doctoral education is usually considered to be a one‐to‐one learning situation with the professor on one side of the table and the doctoral student on the other. With the joint‐Nordic PhD program in logistics, founded in 1997‐1998 by a network of senior scholars from business schools and universities throughout the Nordic countries, doctoral students are now part of a learning network comprising other doctoral students and senior researchers. One of the program’s purposes is to establish doctoral courses in logistics to improve and secure the quality of research. So far, two courses have been completed: “Logistics in a philosophy of science perspective” and “Methods in logistics research”. The student response to the initiative has been very positive. The Nordic Research Academy (NorFA) and the participating universities have supported the program financially.