Quality Assurance in Doctoral Education – results of the ARDE project

By Joanne Byrne, Thomas Jørgensen, Tia Loukkola. Quality Assurance in Doctoral Education - results of the ARDE project
Executive summary
The ARDE project aimed at demonstrating how quality assurance for doctoral education has been implemented in European universities. As the Bologna Process has developed, universities have put great effort into professionalising their quality assurance as well as their doctoral education, albeit often in separate processes. However, the two processes are beginning to merge. Doctoral education is being managed more professionally through doctoral schools and institutions are giving more attention to accountability and quality enhancement. This publication describes the developments, outlines recommendations and underlines the differences between quality assurance for doctoral education and quality assurance for the first and second cycle.
Chapter 1 gives an outline of the project, its background and methodology. The ARDE project takes its point of departure in the development of doctorate-specific quality assurance processes that have been developed over the last decade. Through a combination of quantitative methods (a European-wide survey) and qualitative methods (focus group meetings with university representatives and a workshop including non-university stakeholders) the ARDE project gathered a wide body of evidence regarding processes, challenges and good practices in quality assurance in doctoral education.
Chapter 2 describes how European quality assurance has developed around the concepts of accountability, quality enhancement and the aim of creating a quality culture engaging management, staff and students in universities. It also describes how universities have professionalised, in the same time period, the management of doctoral education through doctoral schools – institutional bodies that monitor and develop doctoral education.
Chapter 3 presents the survey results, which give more detail concerning the processes in place within institutions to ensure that the management of doctoral education is carried out in an accountable manner. The survey demonstrates that processes are largely in place, though reforms are very much ongoing. There is also a strong indication that doctoral education is evaluated by many different external stakeholders at the same time.
Chapter 4 gives a detailed view of how doctoral education is monitored through external and internal evaluations. The chapter introduces different models of external evaluations, including programme accreditation and institutional audits as well as examples of the use of national qualification frameworks and learning outcomes. Internal evaluations are described with examples of common practices such as the monitoring of doctoral candidates’ progress. The chapter also contains considerations about the specificity of doctoral education and the use of key performance indicators.
Chapter 5 is devoted to the central area of supervision with examples of measures to improve accountability as well as quality enhancement. It outlines a number of good practices in terms of establishing processes to enhance the quality of supervision through the engagement of staff. The chapter also presents different types of supervision rules and guidelines that specify rights, duties and responsibilities of both supervisors and supervisees.
Chapter 6 deals with the issue of career development services and particularly the challenges of creating good feedback mechanisms to develop and improve these services. The chapter contains examples of transferable skills training and the use of career tracking and services on the institutional and national levels. Although quality assurance for career development is less developed and presents considerable challenges, the chapter identifies a number of good practices in the field. The conclusions underline the common purposes for quality assurance in all three cycles as accountability and quality enhancement, but emphasise that the processes to achieve these purposes often contain different elements when it comes to doctoral education due to its nature as training through research. Download Quality Assurance in Doctoral Education - results of the ARDE project.