Vekkaila et al publication
Frontline Learning Research Vol.7 No. 1 (2019) 51
- 64
ISSN 2295-3159
How do doctoral students in STEM fields engage in
scientific knowledge practices?
Jenna Vekkailaa, Viivi Virtanena,Jani
Kukkolab, Liezel Frick c, Kirsi Pyhältöa
a Centre for University Teaching
and Learning (HYPE), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
b Department of Philosophy, History and Arts,
University of Helsinki, Finland
c Department of Curriculum Studies, Stellenbosch
University, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Article received 1 August 2018/ revised 25
November / accepted 31 January / available online 22 February
Abstract
Knowledge creation is at the core of
scientific endeavour. As early career researchers, doctoral
students take part in knowledge creation through engaging in
various knowledge practices and make their original contribution
to knowledge, and become experts in their particular domain.
However, our understanding of what doctoral knowledge practices
entails is still insufficient. For this study, a total of 34
doctoral students from STEM fields, including natural sciences,
bio- and environmental sciences and medicine were interviewed to
gain a better understanding of the kinds of knowledge practices
in which doctoral students in the sciences engage. The data were
collected with semi-structured interviews, which were
qualitatively content analysed. The results showed that the
participants mostly described activities that were established
everyday knowledge practices of the researcher community (75 %),
whereas practices that were innovative (25 %), entailing
transformation of the current practices and developing new ones,
were less often reported. Moreover, the practices were typically
collective, involving the students, their supervisors or other
members of their research groups (67 %). Further investigation
showed that the participants were typically actively engaged in
knowledge practices (79 %) rather than just adapting existing
ones (13 %). Perceiving oneself as a bystander was even less
typical (8 %). The significance of this study lies in exploring
doctoral students’ self-reported knowledge practices in STEM
fields, and demonstrates that they perceive themselves as
actively and collaboratively engaged in creating knowledge.
Keywords: Doctoral training; Doctoral
student; Qualitative study; Knowledge practice; STEM fields
Info corresponding author email: jenna.vekkaila@helsinki.fi
DOI
10.14786/flr.v7i1.393
1. Introduction
Knowledge creation is at the core of scientific endeavour.
Doctoral students are key players in knowledge creation within any
university or discipline since they contribute to the endeavour by
producing an original contribution in the form of doctoral
dissertation, and by extending the knowledge boundaries of a
particular discipline (see e.g., the United Kingdom Quality
Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2008). Therefore, they
should also be a key interest to both universities and
disciplinary communities that stand to benefit from such advances
in knowledge. Knowledge creation takes place through knowledge
practices, entailing various disciplinary research activities such
as data collection, analysis, article writing, elaboration of
concepts and theories, planning a research project, and presenting
research. In STEM fields (the abbreviation STEM referring to
science, engineering, technology and mathematics will be used in
this article) such practices are suggested to be typically
collective (Hakkarainen et al., 2014): doctoral research in STEM
fields is typically focused on solving shared research problems
related to a supervisor’s research projects, pursuing
article-based dissertations that consist of co-authored
internationally refereed journal articles, and working intensively
in relatively strong researcher communities, including several
doctoral students, postdocs, and academic staff. Yet, not all the
researcher communities in the STEM fields embrace collective
knowledge practices, nor do all doctoral students have similar
access to such practices even if they may exist in their
communities. Accordingly, in order to create an optimal learning
environment for knowledge creation for doctoral students in STEM
fields, a better understanding of the knowledge practices, and
ways in which the students engage in these practices during their
studies, is needed. The study aims to contribute to bridging the
gap in the literature in the field by exploring the kinds of
knowledge practices in which doctoral students in STEM fields
engage during their studies. The knowledge practices are explored
in the framework of socio-constructivist views of learning (see
e.g. Sfard, 1998; Paavola, Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2004) by
drawing on the seminal work on” knowledge building” by Nonaka and
Taceukhi (1995), Engeström (1999), and Bereiter (2002).
1.1 Knowledge practices as key for knowledge creation
Knowledge creation is a socially embedded endeavour
(John-Steiner, 2000), rooted in the researcher community typically
comprising of supervisors, other senior scholars, post-doctoral
researchers, doctoral students, and both national and
international researcher networks (McAlpine & Norton, 2006;
Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012) sharing the same object of activity
and knowledge artefacts such as research interest, frameworks,
and/or methods. This has several consequences. The knowledge
creation takes place in the researcher communities via knowledge
practices, which are the socially created ways in which scientists
think, interact, and engage in their day-to-day work (Brew et al.,
2011; McAlpine & Åkerlind, 2010) while carrying out research
enquiries. Such practices entail, for instance, various methods
employed in research, frameworks utilised, research designs
carried out, and scientific writing genres applied. As a result,
doctoral student learning is highly embedded in the knowledge
practices, not only in terms of knowledge acquisition (a mental
process of individual learning) and knowledge participation (a
process of being socialised into an epistemic community), but also
in terms of the deliberate process of creating new knowledge that
has the potential to transform the student’s ways thinking and
behaving (Hakkarainen et al., 2004, 2013).
Prior empirical research on doctoral research knowledge
practices is very limited. Few prior studies indicate that
doctoral students do engage to different extents in different
kinds of knowledge practices, and that differences between the
researcher communities in this regard occur. Hakkarainen and his
colleagues (2013), for instance, showed that doctoral students in
cutting edge research groups in medicine and in natural sciences
were most typically engaged in collective inquiry efforts. In a
more recent study (2014) on leaders of national centers of
excellence in the sciences, it was shown that professors aimed at
cultivating the pursuit of collectively shared research objects,
the pursuit of externally reviewed co-authored journal articles,
and were focused on collective supervision (Hakkarainen et al.,
2014). The findings imply that in the best, cutting-edge research
communities, the aim of such communities is often to deliberately
involve doctoral students in their collective knowledge practices
– including the co-construction of goals, reciprocal monitoring
and planning of research, and the shared regulation of joint
cognitive processes in complex problem-solving (e.g., Hadwin &
Oshige, 2011; Volet, Vauras, & Salonen, 2009), co-authoring,
hard work and intensive training – to become members of the
research communities (Florence & Yore, 2004; Kamler 2008;
Hakkarainen et al. 2013). Through sustained engagement, new
doctoral students are gradually socialized into the knowledge
practices that at its best allow them to work at the frontiers of
knowledge and transform their ways of thinking and behaving
(Holmes, 2004). A great deal of this kind of learning takes place
through horizontal (between-peer) (see Fenge, 2012) and vertical
(between newcomers and senior researchers) knowledge sharing.
Engaging in the cutting-edge knowledge practices allows doctoral
students’ co-evolvement and co-development along with their
research problems and co-authored articles, and eventually
‘authoring themselves’ as full-members of top researcher
communities (Holland et al., 1998).
However, knowledge practices should not be seen as a singular
construct. Accordingly, at least distinction between the
established knowledge practices (commonly known in the community
that everyone needs to master) and innovative practices (that are
typically novel or recently transformed), can be made (Hakkarainen
et al., 2004). Moreover, the practices may vary from individual to
collective, and from routine practices related to supporting
knowledge building to more fluid and innovative practices, which
foster the solving of emergent and novel problems (e.g.,
Hakkarainen et al., 2013) that mediate progress towards new
scientific discoveries. The practices can also be more or less
explicit and intentional. Established knowledge practices are more
often tacit, since they are well mastered by the established
members of the researcher community than in the case of newly
developed innovative practices that often still require extra
effort to maintain. In addition, the practices are not static in
nature; instead, they constantly and intentionally evolve and
change in the interplay between individuals and their communities
(Lave & Wenger, 1991). Learning about these practices and how
to participate in them is essential for becoming a scientist
(e.g., Becher & Trowler, 2001).
The knowledge practices are to a certain extent context
dependent. In STEM fields, solving complex problems through
laboratory or fieldwork often requires intensive group-based
collaborative knowledge practices (Cumming, 2009; Delamont &
Atkinson, 2001) and expertise is distributed among the various
researchers at different career phases. This is especially typical
in large-scale research projects with many staff members and where
a variety of research instruments are utilised (e.g., Furner,
2003). Moreover, researcher groups often develop their own set of
distinctive knowledge practices that evolve over the time. The
knowledge practices of the researcher community determine to a
great extent not only the quality of their research outputs, but
also what the doctoral students learn during their studies, and
the overall quality of the doctoral experience. In addition,
individual variation between the students in how they engage in
these practices is likely to occur. Accordingly, in order to
understand the influence such practices may have on the students,
we need to explore what kinds of knowledge practices doctoral
students engage in, and how they engage in them.
1.2 Doctoral student engagement in knowledge practices
Doctoral students themselves can engage differently within the
knowledge practices provided by the researcher communities
(Hopwood, 2010; Mathieson, 2011). They can, for instance, adopt,
adapt, or withdraw from the practices, and their involvement or
lack thereof may eventually modify the practices i.e. display
agentic behaviours (Hopwood, 2010; Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012).
This includes working with others to expand the “object of
activity”, by recognizing the motives and resources of others,
interpreting them, and aligning one’s own responses to these
interpretations with the responses of others involved while
expanding knowledge in terms of the doctoral project (Pyhältö
& Keskinen, 2012). Because sense of agency, while internal, is
always constructed in a physical, social, and cultural context,
the researcher community can either promote or hinder doctoral
students’ sense of agency (O’ Meara, Terosky, & Neumann,
2008). Variation across the doctoral students in their experienced
ability to exercise their agency is based on a variety of
personal, social, and organizational resources and demands at hand
(O’ Meara & Campbell, 2011). Therefore, an important aspect of
developing relational agency is having an opportunity to
participate and contribute (Greeno, 2006; Lipponen &
Kumpulainen, 2011; Pyhältö, Pietarinen & Soini, 2012) to the
knowledge practices of the researcher community (Hancock, Hughes,
& Walsh, 2017). This requires creating the kinds of practices
in which doctoral students are seen and treated as accountable
researchers. However, the students’ active and responsive
collaboration with the researcher community that makes it possible
to expand understanding and create new knowledge cannot be taken
for granted (Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012). Hence students can
display various degrees of agency in the knowledge practices
provided by the researcher community ranging from active and
interactional agent, to obedient employer, whose task is to learn
“the rules of the game” and carry tasks given by the senior
members of the researcher community. The ability of doctoral
students to participate in knowledge creation is shown to be
determined both by individual attributes, such as their
motivation, skills, and ability to carry out agentic behaviour
(Jazvac-Martek, Chen, & McAlpine, 2011; McAlpine &
Amundsen, 2009; see also Bandura, 2001; Hadwin & Oshige,
2011), as well as researcher community attributes, such as the way
in which doctoral students are introduced to the community, the
quality and quantity of supervisory and researcher community
support provided, and the nature of practices in the given
community (e.g., Delamont & Atkinson, 2001; Gardner, 2007;
Golde, 2010; Jazvac-Martek et al., 2011).
At its best, from the beginning of their doctoral processes
students are involved in the knowledge practices, which are
focused on the knowledge objects that enhance both knowledge and
associated practices (Hakkarainen, et al., 2004; Walker et al.,
2008). It has been suggested that in order for doctoral students
to create new ideas, they first need a foundation for their
creative actions – that is, they must master the existing
frameworks, their rules and limits (Frick & Brodin, 2014).
Thus, engaging in shared and innovative knowledge practices
enables doctoral students to surpass their individual limitations
and create new ideas (e.g., Walker et al., 2008). This further
results in changes both in the relationship between the
researchers and their working environment, and in shared knowledge
objects (e.g., Hakkarainen et al., 2004; Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Yet, Pyhältö & Keskinen (2012) found that doctoral students in
behavioural sciences, humanities and medicine rarely displayed
agentic behaviours within their researcher communities. Prior
studies imply that the knowledge practices of scientific
communities play a central role in the process of learning to
become a scientist, yet our understanding of the nature and
function of knowledge practices, especially among STEM field
doctoral students, is insufficient.
2. Aim of the study
Since no research (empirical or non-empirical) exists on
doctoral students’ knowledge practices in STEM areas, the aim of
this study was to gain a better understanding of the kinds of
knowledge practices in which doctoral students in STEM fields
engage during their doctoral process. In order to reach the aim,
the study addressed two complementary research questions; firstly,
the kinds of knowledge practices reported by the doctoral students
were identified, and secondly, the ways in which students
participated into these practices were explored.
3. Methods
3.1 Finnish doctoral education in STEM fields
Finnish doctoral education in the sciences (Pyhältö, Stubb,
& Tuomainen, 2011) is based on the European model. Conducting
doctoral thesis research is embedded in the activities of the
research community. The doctorate involves a dissertation and its
public defence. It is complemented with coursework (total 60-80
ECTS) that is based on personal study plans, typically including
international conferences and some methodological studies.
Doctoral education in Finland is outlined in more detail by
Pyhältö, Nummenmaa, Soini, Stubb, and Lonka (2012).
Our study includes science, medicine, and bio- and environmental
sciences. Considering academic research they all can be viewed as
natural sciences in which research is based on empirical evidence
from observation and experimentation with mathematics as crucial
partner. In Finland physics, chemistry, and biology are the
contents of entrance examination into studying medicine, and in
the research-intensive university the master students from biology
often do their doctorates in medicine. Hence, we use in this paper
the abbreviation STEM with medicine included. In Finnish science,
medicine, and bio- and environmental sciences, the most common
type of doctoral thesis is a summary of articles. Each doctoral
student is required to publish from three to five articles in
peer-reviewed international journals. The articles are often
co-authored with the supervisors. Doctoral students in these
fields usually work on their PhDs full time, and the typical
completion time varies from four to six years. The key
distributives of doctoral education in the faculties of bio- and
environmental sciences, medicine and science are reported in Table
1. There are some differences between the faculties. Most doctoral
students conduct their work alone in science whereas in medicine
and bio- and environmental sciences the work is usually conducted
in the research group. Further, the science students are less
often engaged in the doctoral programs compared to their
colleagues in the other two faculties. Yet the graduation time is
shorter in science and medicine than in bio- and environmental
sciences. The original survey data for the analysis was collected
in 2011 with a broad range of disciplines included (Pyhältö,
Stubb, & Tuomainen, 2011), and in light of that, the three
faculties share a quite similar system of doctoral education.
However, particularly the differences in research group status may
have effect on the knowledge practices identified from the
doctoral students’ interviews.
Table 1
The structure of doctoral education in the faculties under
study: Doctoral students’ (N) membership of doctoral program and
research group, typical form of conducting thesis, and typical
graduation time (see original data; Pyhältö, Stubb, &
Tuomainen, 2011).
3.2 Participants
A total of 34 doctoral students from STEM fields (7 participants
from the natural sciences, 7 participants from medicine, and 20
participants from the bio- and environmental sciences)
participated in the study. They were all conducting their research
and theses at a large research-intensive Finnish university. All
the participants had a master’s degree; most of the participants
(n=29) were full-time doctoral students and five were part-time.
All the participants were pursuing a summary of articles, but they
were in different phases of their doctoral process: five were in
the beginning of the doctoral process, meaning that they were
typically launching their research projects, collecting or
analysing data, or writing their first or second article. Nine of
the participants were in the middle part of the process, which
typically included data analysis and writing a third or fourth
article. Most of the participants (n=16) were in the last part of
the process, which typically meant finalizing the last articles
and the summary of the articles. Four participants had already
defended their doctoral theses. All the participants were
interviewed on a voluntary basis.
3.3 Data collection
Data were collected by employing semi-structured interviews
(e.g., Kvale, 2007). The interview protocol was designed to
investigate the doctoral students’ experiences of their thesis
processes and their views of themselves within these processes
(Stubb, Pyhältö, & Lonka, 2014). All interviews were conducted
by members of the authors’ research group. The interviews lasted
from 22 minutes to almost three hours. The interviews were
recorded and transcribed verbatim.
3.4 Analysis
The interview data were qualitatively content analysed (e.g.,
Creswell, 2012) by relying on an abductive strategy (e.g., Morgan,
2007). Hence, when categorising the data, observations and prior
understanding based on theories were repeatedly assessed in
relation to each other by combining data-grounded (Harry, Sturges,
& Klingner, 2005; Mills, Bonner, & Francis, 2006) and
theory-guided analysis strategies (Creswell, 2012) in order to
acquire the most accurate possible understanding of doctoral
students’ experiences of knowledge practices. The analysis
included four complementary phases.
At first, all text segments related to knowledge practices were
identified. These included all doctoral students’ expressions of
conducting research work alone or together with other researchers.
The criteria for the text segments, which where coded as
experiences of knowledge practices, were that they involved a
description of research activities and the object of activity
(e.g., data collection, analysis, article writing, elaboration of
concepts and theories, planning a research project, presenting
research). The analysis resulted in 192 text segments from 34
interviews that were included in the further analysis. The units
ranged from a couple of sentences to a dozen sentences.
Secondly, the knowledge practices identified in the first phase
were coded according to the quality of the practices into two
exclusive categories by applying a model proposed by Hakkarainen
et al. (2004): 1): Established practices: including text segments
in which the practices are reported to be commonly known in the
community, or practices that everyone needs to adapt; and 2)
Innovative practices: including text segments in which the
practices are reported to be modified from the existing or new
practices.
Thirdly, the knowledge practices were further categorised into
two categories based on whether they were described as individual
or collective. The analysis yielded two categories: 1) Individual
knowledge practices, consisting of descriptions of working alone
with the research; and 2) Collective knowledge practices,
consisting of reports of community-based activities in which two
or more researchers are involved.
At the fourth analytical phase, all the knowledge practices were
coded further into three categories according to how the doctoral
students described their roles in the practices: 1) Active,
containing expressions of being an intentional participant who can
affect the activities; 2) Adaptation, containing descriptions of
being a passive participant in the practice or doing activities
that someone else has ordered them to do; and 3) Bystander,
containing reports of not being involved in or having an
unorganized perception of one’s role in the practice.
The analysis process was conducted by the first, the second and
the third authors. The categories derived from the analysis were
critically assessed by the research group at the end of each
analysis phase in order to enhance the trustworthiness and
credibility of the analysis and results (e.g., Miles &
Huberman, 1994). In the few cases of disagreement, a consensus of
final categorization was reached through discussion amongst the
researchers. To increase the reliability of our analysis parallel
coding was carried out with 67% of the data (total of 129 text
segments) independently by two co-authors. The inter-rater
reliability for each of the analysis phase were: The agreement
range was 100 % (first phase); 81 % (second phase), 95 % (third
phase) to 74 % (fourth phase). The few cases of disagreement
(particularly phase 2 and 4) we relied on coding of the co-author
who had background in the STEM-field research, since we presumed
that she was more familiar with the knowledge practices of the
STEM fields. In the Findings section, we provide direct quotations
from the participants’ descriptions, translated from Finnish to
English. The quotations were selected to illustrate the particular
category as well as to highlight the differences between the
categories. For each category, there were several potential
illustrative quotations from each discipline available. The most
comprehensive quotations were chosen from each category while
keeping at the same time track that all disciplines were equally
represented.
4. Results
The doctoral students described a variety of knowledge practices
(f=192). The practices ranged from individual work with research
instruments to dialogues about theories and observation, as well
as shared problem solving and making new discoveries. The reported
practices also differed in terms of how established or innovative
they were, as described by the participants. Furthermore, the
participants described their role in the reported practices in
varying ways.
4.1 Established and innovative knowledge practices
The majority of all the knowledge practices reported were
established everyday practices cultivated by the researcher
community (75 %). Such practices typically involved mastering and
using research instruments and methods, defining and planning the
research topics and processes. The students also described
practices related to scientific writing and publishing. One of the
participants described such a practice in the following way:
In the beginning, my time was spent grasping the laboratory
practices and that sort of stuff. And I do use all of them quite
diversely, the different laboratory techniques, I mean. And they
are demanding—I didn’t even learn them at first. So, they do
require a slow and steady pace to get the hang of them.
(Medicine 2)
Occasionally, the students described established practices
resulting in a discovery. The established practices resulting the
discoveries were often cultivated and sustained by the researcher
communities for long time. In these cases, the method itself was
established and well-known, but it was used in a way that resulted
in originality, as the following excerpt shows:
In a way, the techniques I use in that [study] are the ones
that have been the practice in many laboratories for a long
time, but in many places these are no longer used. Still, our
group has trusted that this is the way to go… in the end we took
a real risk and it turned out to be fruitful, and of course that
was really motivating. (Bio 2)
Sometimes the participants reported practices that were
innovative, entailing transformation of the current practices and
developing new ones. These practices were less typical (25 %)
compared to established practices. Innovative practices are the
ones of utmost interest with knowledge creation at issue.
Innovative practices typically emerged in situations where
established ones did not work or did not provide solutions for the
problems faced. Accordingly, they were characterised by learning
from errors. The innovative practices were either reformed or
modified from established ones, or new practices that were just
created for solving novel problems. These practices were typically
related to developing research ideas and theoretical observations,
solving empirical problems and mastering research techniques, as
well as getting results and making discoveries. The new ways of
doing were often associated with aiming at, or actually
constructing, new knowledge: a new research idea, theoretical
observation, or scientific discovery. Occasionally, the students
faced research related problems and found solutions on their own:
So I have been testing different techniques as a kind of
pioneer work, as there hasn’t been anyone in the research group
who’s used these methods… I have, kind of, made these tools up
for myself and that is the reason why it has taken such a long
time… and I often find myself at a dead end. (Bio 18)
4.2 Collective and individual knowledge practices
The participants described that the knowledge practices involved
not only the students themselves, but also others, typically their
supervisors, peers or other researchers from their researcher
groups. Hence, the reported practices were mostly collective (67
%). Resulting from the fact that research was often carried out in
research groups (Table 1). The students reported that engaging in
conceptual discussion and working with theoretical ideas, defining
and planning their research work, as well as mastering research
techniques and writing a publication were the kinds of practices
that involved their supervisors, other senior researchers and
peers. For instance, the supervisors and colleagues were often
active in providing suggestions and guidelines for their students
in choosing their research topics, as well as planning their
research processes:
Depending on the article I’ve been working on, many of my
colleagues have collaborated with me…discussing how to do this
and this. Depending on the research questions, the procedure has
been different with different people. So maybe this says
something about the multidisciplinarity we’ve had, having all
these different people with their different viewpoints involved
in a single project. (Natural science 4)
Further, while typically the collective practices were also
described as established activities, interestingly, there were
more descriptions of innovative activities among collective
practices than among individual practices. In STEM fields, solving
complex problems through laboratory or field research often
requires intensive group-based collaborative research practices
resulting that not only knowledge creation but also researcher
development is highly embedded in intensive group-based
collaborative research practices. One participant expressed how he
had started to develop his own research ideas and increasingly
became involved in dialogues throughout the doctoral process:
In the beginning, it was mostly the supervisors who had the
ideas—that we could do things this or that way. But the longer
it took, the more I got into the practicalities and learned to
deal with them. After that, I’ve been able to think more about
what I want to research next, and to bring more and more of my
own ideas to the brainstorming. (Medicine 3)
Participants described a third of all the reported practices as
individual (33 %), such as working on their own and how they
learned to use research methods, instruments and devices through
individual study or experimentation. The students also described
their individual responsibilities and the challenges they faced,
such as experiences of being without support, as one participant
describes:
So if the group does something for the first time. I feel
that it’s sort of my responsibility. And it slightly burdens me,
because I haven’t got any training for that. And the
supervisors, they are clearly not able to help. Then you feel
quite alone. (Medicine 2)
4.3 The engagement of doctoral students in knowledge practices
Further investigation showed that the students typically
experienced being actively engaged in knowledge practices (79 %).
Hence, they perceived themselves as active actors and intentional
participants who were able to affect activities and make decisions
in the practice at hand. This is a key for cultivating relational
agency both in terms of the engaging in knowledge creation in
order to deliver original research output as well as in terms of
becoming full member of the researcher community. Active
engagement was described in established and innovative, collective
and individual practices related to using and mastering research
methods, instruments, or techniques, as well as working with
conceptual and theoretical problems, and developing and sharing
ideas:
I just went through and compared the comments, and there
was this sort of eureka moment I had, that maybe all I need to
do is to decide for myself. I realized that I have my own
opinion about where this should go, and it was very close to
what one of my supervisors thought as well. But, it was also
against the view of my other supervisor. But then again, in the
end, I just made my own decision. And I came to the conclusion
that even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’ there really isn’t
always exactly one truth to follow. (Natural science 3)
In the following, another participant expresses how he had an
active role and control over his research work:
I’ve been given a lot of room for my own self-guidance, and
my own thoughts and implementations. And I’ve never really had
any difficulties in getting my own thoughts about what I wanted
to do heard. So in that regard it’s been quite rewarding, and
I’ve been given the opportunity to do plenty of different kinds
of things. (Bio 18)
Doctoral students less frequently described adapting existing
activities and ideas. Such experiences were only occasionally
reported among all the instances of knowledge practices (13 %). A
characteristic of these experiences was that the students
considered themselves to be passive participants who were doing
activities and work that someone else wanted or had ordered them
to do. Accordingly, developing relational agency is not easy or
self-evidently resulted from carrying out doctoral research. If
doctoral students are not given opportunity to participate and
contribute actively to the knowledge practices of their researcher
community, including opportunity for experimenting and even to
fail, also the opportunities for learning to become a researcher
are limited. In some cases, the students believed that the way
others carried out the activities was not meaningful for them.
Such roles were often described in association with established
and collective practices. Furthermore, these descriptions were
typically related to planning the research topic and process,
developing research ideas, as well as writing an article. One of
the participants expressed his adaptive role in choosing and
conducting his doctoral research in the following way:
I was told that I should be working on this doctoral
dissertation topic. They needed a candidate for it. And I just
went and started in that project where they had the opening for
one more student and was stuck there. I could not choose the
topic myself, but partly there was kind of pressure to have this
topic that was worth four academic articles. And I need those
four. But in this situation, it is not that I can just
creatively come up with something to research. Something I’d
find interesting to look further into by myself. But it’s just
not possible. If the thing you’re working on doesn’t sound [to
the supervisors] like it’s going to be good enough, then it’s
not worth spending your time on, and you would be told to work
on other stuff. Kind of from the top down. (Medicine 4)
Doctoral students rarely considered themselves bystanders (8 %),
in other words, observers who were left outside the practice. Yet
experiencing oneself as bystander can be considered highly
problematic since it limits doctoral student’s learning both in
terms of becoming independent researcher, and in delivering
original research output. In the cases where this did occur, they
described seemingly unclear and unorganised perceptions of their
role in the practice. The bystander role was typically associated
with established and collective practices related to, for
instance, defining and discussing the research topic and plan,
designing the research questions or writing a publication. One
participant described his role of a bystander in the following
way:
Then, our clinician actually wrote the paper because I did
not have the right clinical background for that. (Bio 6).
5. Discussion
Our results show that established knowledge practices played an
important role in cultivating doctoral students’ insights into
their research, developing creative thoughts and behaviours,
enabling them to define a problem space and to solve them. Such
practices are typically well tested and cultivated over long
period of time by the researcher community, and hence provide a
grounding for its knowledge creation. Engaging doctoral students
in these baseline knowledge practices is key both for becoming
full member of the community and teaching them about the research
and disciplinary practices, as mastery of existing ideas and tools
are often a precondition for creativity. The established knowledge
practices served as the basis for making discoveries and, hence,
the creation of new knowledge (see also Sternberg & Lubart,
1999). Accordingly, the established knowledge practices provided a
vehicle for introducing and engaging doctoral students into the
researcher communities, i.e. socialising the student as a novice
into the academic community (Becher & Trowler, 2001). They
also provided a starting point for researcher development. In
addition, the existence and extent of the reported innovative
practices evident from our dataset is encouraging, since it
implies that doctoral students are contributing to novel ways of
working, and the transformation of their respective fields of
study (Trafford & Leshem, 2009; Wellington, 2012). Engaging in
such practices provides also opportunity to learn from the
mistakes, and use them as opportunity to further cultivate the
established practices. More importantly, it allows doctoral
students learn how to develop new collective knowledge practices
in order to create knowledge in their field.
Doctoral students are frequently found to face academic
isolation and a lack of academic connections (see for example Ali
& Kohun, 2006; Austin, 2009) that hinder their progress. Our
results on knowledge practices suggest that the doctoral students
in the STEM fields engaged primarily in collective practices. This
is partly explained by the fact that majority of the participants
engaged in the intensive research group collaborations and
conducted article-based dissertations including typically
co-authored articles with senior members of the group. However,
the result cannot be reduced into the research group status, since
the majority of students in sciences reported that they did not
carry out their dissertation work in the research group.
Accordingly, rather than being matter of the structure, it seems
to be a matter of the quality of knowledge practices developed in
which doctoral students engaged in that matters. The argument
follows that students can be actively engaged in collective
practices even though they are not formally carrying out their
dissertation work in the group. This finding is in accordance with
our prior results on medical, humanities, and behavioural science
doctoral students, which showed that more than half of the
students perceived themselves as members of a scholarly community
and its practices. No statistically significant differences were
detected in the previous study even though in medicine the
majority of the students worked in a research group and carried
out article-based dissertations, while in the humanities the
students were more likely to follow a monograph dissertation
format and were not formally engaged in research groups (Pyhältö,
Stubb, & Lonka, 2009). Even tough working collectively does
not guarantee that doctoral students won’t experience feelings of
isolation, the data presented in this article can be considered
encouraging since the advantages of collaboration to productivity,
and thus also to knowledge creation, have been emphasised (see for
example Becher & Trowler, 2001).
The results also suggest that the doctoral students typically
considered themselves active participants in knowledge practices
instead of mere adapters or bystanders. This provides a good
grounding for cultivating the doctoral students’ relational agency
within their researcher communities in terms of knowledge
practices that may contribute to eventual knowledge creation.
Given that research groups and collective work are typical in STEM
areas, this finding is not surprising. Yet, it partly contradicts
some of our earlier findings suggesting that a minority of
doctoral students in humanities, behavioural sciences, and
medicine perceived themselves as active relational agents in their
own researcher communities (Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012).
However, our results also imply that not all the students enjoy
equal opportunities to exercise relational agency. Moreover, it is
important to note that active engagement in knowledge practices in
their researcher groups does not guarantee an active role in other
activities of the group or in other researcher communities.
As the stakes are high for doctoral students to complete their
studies in a timely manner, our findings about doctoral students’
active role imply that doctoral education provided engaging
learning environment for knowledge creation for the majority of
our participants (see also Frick, 2010). However, taking on the
role of adapter or bystander should not be viewed with outright
suspicion, as mastery that supports knowledge creation requires an
understanding of existing knowledge and an immersion in the field
before such a field can be extended or transformed through new and
original work (Dewett et al., 2005; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999).
Yet, if students spend the majority of their time as either
adapters or bystanders, in which case they may become stuck in
these roles, or resort to mimicking others’ knowledge work rather
than creating their own contribution and transforming the field in
so doing it can be considered highly problematic (Kiley, 2009).
The significance of this study lies in exploring doctoral
students’ self-reported knowledge practices in STEM fields, and
shows that they typically perceive themselves as actively and
collaboratively engaged in the practices through transforming
their respective fields of study. Moreover, the study indicates
that doctoral knowledge creation embedded in knowledge practices
in the studied STEM areas is not only an individual cognitive
endeavour. Instead, it is also a collective process, which takes
place in a broader scientific community, not exclusively limited
in conducting doctoral dissertation in the research group
5.1 Methodological considerations
The strength of the chosen qualitative design was that it
enabled a multifaceted and deep investigation of doctoral
students’ experiences of knowledge practices. In addition, the
multiphase analysis enabled investigation of the knowledge
practices from various perspectives. However, one problem with the
used retrospective approach is that it exposes the memory effect
(Cox & Hassard, 2007), potentially resulting in difficulties
for participants in recalling their experiences (Kvale, 2007). At
the same time, use of the retrospective approach ensured that the
participants had a chance to deeply reflect on their experiences
and recall the most significant past events (Kvale, 2007). The
majority of the participants were in the middle or in the last
part of the doctoral process and, because of their experience,
they have had more opportunities to be involved in and gain
experience with various kinds of knowledge practices.
The interview data were collected from 34 doctoral students in
the STEM fields from a large research-intensive university in
Finland. Because of the distinctive features of the disciplines
included (e.g., Lindblom-Ylänne et al., 2006) and the limited
sample size, the results should be generalised to other fields and
other countries with caution. Knowledge creation practices evolve
over time and, hence, further research is needed to explore the
knowledge practices among researcher communities from different
domains and from a longitudinal perspective.
5.2 Implications for doctoral education
Our results indicate that doctoral students can have active
roles and be intentional participants in various scientific
knowledge practices. Further, the findings suggest that active
engagement in knowledge practices can be enabled by supporting
doctoral students to influence or direct the surrounding. This
requires further developing strategies that promote the
intentional participation of students in scientific activities and
practices (Pyhältö & Keskinen, 2012; Zhao & Kuh, 2004).
Active engagement can be supported through environments that
enable doctoral students to share their knowledge and expertise
with others, take more responsibility for and ownership of their
research activities, and perceive themselves as contributing
members of their community (e.g., Dunlap, 2006; McAlpine &
Amundsen, 2009). For instance, the more experienced members of the
researcher communities, such as supervisors, senior researchers
and post-doctoral fellows, could support and encourage doctoral
students to take increasingly more ownership and responsibility
for planning, monitoring and evaluating the everyday practices of
knowledge creation. Such practices, according to our results,
could be planning and conducting actual research work, theoretical
problem solving, and dialogues on research ideas. Supporting the
active role of doctoral students in knowledge practices is likely
to be an investment in the quality of future academic work. At
best, active doctoral students will become autonomous scientists
who create new, high-quality knowledge.
Keypoints
The study aims to contribute to the doctoral education
literature by exploring the kinds of knowledge practices in
which doctoral students in the STEM fields engage during their
studies.
The significance of this study lies in exploring doctoral
students’ self-reported knowledge practices.
This study demonstrates that the doctoral students perceive
themselves as actively and collaboratively engaged in the
knowledge practices.
The study concludes that active engagement in knowledge
practices can be enabled by supporting doctoral students to
influence or direct the surrounding knowledge creation
activities.
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