The role of thinking styles in program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence among STEM doctoral students.

Abstract

This research pioneered the investigation of the role of doctoral students’ thinking styles in their program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence. Participants were 285 STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) students in Hong Kong. Results showed that students’ thinking styles as measured by the Thinking Styles Inventory—Revised II (Sternberg, Wagner, & Zhang, 2007) statistically significantly predicted their program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence as assessed by two of the scales in the newly constructed Graduate Student Survey (Shin et al., 2015)—beyond their gender, program year, and academic discipline. Findings have brought new insights into the assessment of doctoral students’ program satisfaction and perceived intellectual competence. At the same time, findings have contributed to the literature on intellectual styles and that on doctoral education in STEM fields. Practical implications of the findings are proposed for STEM doctoral students in understanding their own ways of thinking and program experiences and outcomes, as well as for academics and senior managers in their efforts to enhance students’ access to positive program experiences and outcomes.

The association of thinking styles with research agendas among academics in the social sciences

“…We felt that the complete version would make the online survey too long, and thus reduce the rate of completion. This abridged version was previously validated by Zhang, Horta, Jung, Chen, and Postiglione () for a population of PhD students, but considering that our population constituted academics, we conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to determine the factorial validity for this abridged version, as well as its reliability for academics. The results of this exercise can be found in Appendix and demonstrate that the abridged version of TSI‐R2 exhibits good psychometric properties in terms of both validity and reliability.…”

No road is long with good company. What factors affect Ph.D. student’s satisfaction with their supervisor?

“…It can be argued that doing a PhD requires specific traits. Recent research by Zhang et al (2018) has shown that the thinking stylesnamely type I, associated with a preference for creative and complex cognitive tasks, and type II, associated with a preference for tasks favouring following norms and requiring lower levels of cognitive complexity (Sternberg et al, 2007) of Ph.D. students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics affect their satisfaction with the doctoral programme curricula, peer interactions, their perceptions HEED 15,1 of institutional support and their perception of their own intellectual competence. In a similar vein, Ph.D. students' satisfaction of the personal and professional relationship with their supervisors may also be affected by their preferred ways of learning.…”

“…(2) associate professor and ( 3 Zhang et al, 2018;and Sternberg et al, 2007). The three Type I thinking styles are (1) legislative, which is a preference for tasks that require creative strategies, (2) liberal, which is a preference for tasks that involve novelty and ambiguity and (3) hierarchical, which is a preference for distributing attention across tasks with a sense of priority.…”

“…Previous studies using the TSI-R2 indicate that all the scales have satisfactory internal scale reliabilities (e.g. Fan and Zhang, 2014) and are valid for assessing thinking styles in a wide range of populations (see Zhang et al, 2018). The internal structure of the TSI-R2 is examined via confirmatory factor analysis and principal component analysis, using SPSS.…”

“…Studies have found the 30-item sample to be reliable (Zhang et al, 2018) 4. For clarity, only those control variables that offered statistically significant results are included in the table.…”