Regulations and practices of structured doctoral education in the life sciences in Germany

Daniel Lachmann, Thilo Martius, Julia Eberle, Mareike Landmann, Lena von Kotzebue, Birgit Neuhaus and Stefan Herzig

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 7, 1-24

Abstract: Structured doctoral education is increasingly preferred compared to the individual model. Several science policy organisations give recommendations on how to structure doctoral education. However, there is little research on to what extent these recommendations find their way into practice. In our study, we first compared European and German recommendations on doctoral education with, second, the institutional regulations of structured doctoral programmes (N = 98) in the life sciences at twelve different German universities. Additionally, we third asked doctoral graduates (N = 1796) of these structured doctoral programmes and graduates of individual doctoral studies about their experience in doctoral education. Fourth, we contrasted the regulations of structured doctoral programmes with the reported experiences of their graduates. We found significant deviations of the reported practices of graduates from the regulations of their organisations, regarding the student admission, supervision and curricular activities of doctoral candidates. The efficacy of structured versus traditional doctoral education should be examined based on reported practice rather than on the respective written regulations.

Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0233415 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 33415&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0233415

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233415

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().