Theme:73bfb9ec-b7f5-4a0a-a0b0-e460990b59cb

Themes

Superb Supervision: integrity training for supervisors

What is this about?

Superb Supervision is an initiative that stimulates research integrity (RI) in the form of a course. The course covers a three- day long training from 9 to 5 in which researchers are taught skills to become better supervisors and to supervise responsible research. Therefore, the course is meant to be for either junior-researchers or senior-researchers that (will) have a role as supervisor. The main objectives of this course are raising awareness, training skills to enable responsible practice and guidance to practice with integrity. The exact program and registration can be found here (junior) and here (senior).

For whom is this important?

SupervisorsMentorsJunior researchersPhD Students

In Detail

The start of Superb Supervision

“Some people, when you let them swim, come out really well. It is a bit a matter of luck and not everyone has it. A little thing can cause unfortunate struggles where a supervisor could have given you the support that you deserve.” (Tamarinde Haven, translated from Dutch)

The motivation to start a course for supervisors goes way long back, according to PhD-candidate and one of the initiators Tamarinde Haven. During her PhD project on academic research climate, a survey among the AmsterdamUMC research institutes plus focus groups - exposed that there is an overall agreement that a good research culture is very important. The next important question for the respondents was how they would envision a good and responsible research climate in practice. Apparently, supervision related to research position appeared to be a strong theme. Asking further it appeared that -overall- many respondents dealt with cases of insufficient supervision.

Whereas the questionnaire showed insight in the academic research, the issues of supervision were already expressed by other universities.

The competency of being a good supervisor is something that has been neglected and it is clearly something that the focus group participants expressed. In order to improve this situation, a good course to train people that are going to supervise PhD candidates would really help. Whereas there exist supervision courses in general, it became clear that it was important to look into both good supervision and good supervision for responsible research. After finding these results, a RI professional and trainer for academic researchers, Louise Mennen, was contacted. In that year a lot of work was put into how to combine good supervision  and responsible research. Meanwhile, Louise Mennen was asked to help out to create a Superb Supervision course for senior supervisors. This course is very similar to the course for junior-researchers. Despite the idea that much can be learned from mixing junior- and senior researchers, it was intentionally decided to separate the courses, thereby making it more attractive for senior-researchers to spend dedicated time on their needs.

Resources

Superb Supervision first started with a pilot version, which was very positively evaluated and in that way the AmsterdamUMC allowed for an up and running program, which kicked off in January 2020. Since the involved members (Joeri Tijdink, Lex Bouter, Louise Mennen and Marlies Stouthard) are part of different universities in Amsterdam, advertisement for the pilot was quite feasible. The course is currently promoted through the webpage of AmsterdamUMC and soon via the project’s website (…) . Superb Supervision hopes to be sustainable by functioning independently of any kind of funding. Instead, costs are covered by registration payment. Whereas this might demotivate researchers to register for the course,  a positive side-effect is that people usually not quit. Besides, there is possibly accreditation for some researchers, such as doctors and usually such courses can be paid for by the university.

Evaluation and bottlenecks

After each day of the course evaluation took place, in which things such as the relevance, topics and duration were discussed. Whereas the empirical evaluation is still awaiting, so far, the reactions were very positive.

What’s next?

What remains difficult is that the researchers who are not aware of supervision are usually not the ones that register for the course. There haven’t been noteworthy issues during the implementation phase of the initiative. Is it only now that the initiators start discussing how the initiative remains sustainable in the long term, since it is not sure whether all initiators can provide long term support. In order to solve this problem, they are trying to connect more people to the initiative who can potentially replace them one day.

Iris Lechner, Natalie Evans, Fenneke Blom, Andrijana Perković Paloš contributed to this theme. Latest contribution was Oct 22, 2021

Other information

Who

• VU Amsterdam
• Tamarinde Haven
• ARCA
• Amsterdam UMC
• INSPIRE

Where

• The Netherlands

Good Practices & Misconduct

• Supervision