Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
116
Issue
42
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Publication Date
9-30-2019
Award Number
NSF, Division of Graduate Education (DGE) 1760894
Funder
NSF, Division of Graduate Education (DGE)
First Page
20910
Last Page
20916
Abstract
The doctoral advisor—typically the principal investigator (PI)—is often characterized as a singular or primary mentor who guides students using a cognitive apprenticeship model. Alternatively, the “cascading mentorship” model describes the members of laboratories or research groups receiving mentorship from more senior laboratory members and providing it to more junior members (i.e., PIs mentor postdocs, postdocs mentor senior graduate students, senior students mentor junior students, etc.). Here we show that PIs’ laboratory and mentoring activities do not significantly predict students’ skill development trajectories, but the engagement of postdocs and senior graduate students in laboratory interactions do. We found that the cascading mentorship model accounts best for doctoral student skill development in a longitudinal study of 336 PhD students in the United States. Specifically, when postdocs and senior doctoral students actively participate in laboratory discussions, junior PhD students are over 4 times as likely to have positive skill development trajectories. Thus, postdocs disproportionately enhance the doctoral training enterprise, despite typically having no formal mentorship role. These findings also illustrate both the importance and the feasibility of identifying evidence-based practices in graduate education.
Recommended Citation
David F. Feldon, Kaylee Litson, Soojeong Jeong, Jennifer M. Blaney, Jina Kang, Candace Miller, Kimberly Griffin, and Josipa Roksa, Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of phd students’ skill development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (2019), no. 42, 20910–20916.
