Postdocs’ lab engagement predicts trajectories of PhD students’ skill development

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 mentors...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 116; no. 42; pp. 20910 - 20916
Main Authors Feldon, David F., Litson, Kaylee, Jeong, Soojeong, Blaney, Jennifer M., Kang, Jina, Miller, Candace, Griffin, Kimberly, Roksa, Josipa
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 15.10.2019
Subjects
Adult
Cognitive ability
Correlation analysis
Education, Graduate
Female
Graduate students
Graduate studies
Humans
Laboratories
Laboratory Personnel - education
Laboratory Personnel - psychology
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Professional Competence
Research - education
Skill development
Social Sciences
Students
Trajectories
United States
Young Adult
United States
research skills
doctoral education
graduate training
mentorship
postdocs
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Summary: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.
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3Present address: Department of School Psychology and Educational Leadership, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID 83201.
1D.F.F. and K.L. contributed equally to this work.
Author contributions: D.F.F. and J.R. designed research; D.F.F., S.J., J.M.B., C.M., and K.G. performed research; K.L., S.J., J.M.B., and J.K. analyzed data; and D.F.F., K.L., S.J., J.M.B., J.K., and J.R. wrote the paper.
Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved September 9, 2019 (received for review July 19, 2019)
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1912488116