Autonomy in PhD-education – Supervising for Independence

According to the Swedish higher ordinance of education the development of autonomy of PhD students is of high importance. Graduates should be able to formulate new ideas and to independently assess and evaluate scientific results. Therefore it is interesting to investigate how the relationship between student and supervisor impacts the development of autonomy. In this work, we have evaluated the impact of the supervision relationship by a supervisor/studentalignment test (N=25) where both students and their supervisors perform a self-evaluation of the student’s level of autonomy and the supervisor’s supervision style. The test results show that the autonomy is greater for students with longer experience and also more aligned with the level of autonomy as perceived by their supervisors. The misalignment between the assessment done by students and supervisors decreases with age and time spent as a PhD student. However, we find that the misalignment increases when supervisors have many concurrent PhD students. We observe no statistical differences with respect to gender or nationality.