Meeting graduate student needs: an exploration of disciplinary differences

Abstract

To better engage our graduate students, we asked them to describe their research strategy and challenges, helpful research support services, and their preferred venue for learning research skills. We conducted a thematic analysis and found that participants' top reported research strategies included "Research Topic Development" and "Literature Review," while their challenges cited "Finding and Evaluating Information" and "Access Issues." The students mentioned "Library Databases" most frequently as helpful and websites were their most preferred learning venue. We found evidence that discipline-specific library instruction may be more relevant than large, in-person orientations and discovered a concerning trend of situational challenges.

Ready or Not? A Pilot Study of Graduate Students’ and Instructors’ Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Online Support Modules for Enhancing Academic Performance

“…How do graduate students perceive the support modules as enhancing their academic performance? Overall, the students reported positive feelings about the support modules and recognized their need for support in academic skills after gaps in their schooling and other factors [12,50]. Similar to participants in other studies, these students faced external struggles that impacted their performance when returning to graduate school, including balancing their personal lives with academic work and having experience with changing style guides and expectations specifically [22,23,31].…”

“…As adult learners, those same students are also balancing life with jobs and family, putting even more strain on their ability to perform in formal studies [11]. Moreover, gaps in pursuing a graduate degree impact the necessary skills to succeed [12]. Subsequently, graduate faculty face the dilemma of providing remediation or potentially lessening course assignments' rigor and high expectations [13].…”

Skills, support networks, and socialization: Needs of dissertating graduate students

“…It is well established that graduate students are less likely to seek out help from librarians than they are from professors or peers (George et al, 2006). Several studies have tried to explain the reason for this gap and suggest that graduate students don't know about library services (Sadler & Given, 2007), think they should know how to solve problems by themselves (Fleming-May & Yuro, 2009;Ismail, 2013), or are unsure that librarians will have sufficient expertise to help them (Bussell et al, 2020;Castro-Gessner et al, 2013;Gibbs et al, 2012;Rempel, 2010). In one survey of library services for graduate students, graduate students are characterized as a population that is "misunderstood, elusive, or hard to reach" (Baruzzi & Calcagno, 2015, p. 401).…”

“…They also exhibit hybrid characteristics: like faculty, they are intrinsically motivated, treat research as detective work, and engage in extensive browsing; like undergraduates, they rely on faculty guidance, often lack prior subject knowledge, and have their time structured by external deadlines (Barrett, 2005). Several other studies have examined student perspectives on information seeking (Gibbs et al, 2012), how international graduate students adapt to new academic cultures in the United States (Reyes et al, 2018), the importance of scholarly dialogue and social information seeking (Moore & Singley, 2019), and the prominence of social networks and disciplinary differences in graduate student information seeking (Bussell et al, 2020).…”