Building a Postgraduate Supervision Model for Student Success in South Africa: How Masters and Doctoral Students’ Experiences can Assist?

A critical gap exists in South African higher education research on postgraduate supervision models. Research emphasis is placed in administrative aspects over the supervision praxis for student throughput. This paper investigates an effective postgraduate supervision model in South Africa to enhance student success. The literature underscores the need for an approach that balances the teaching and the supervising of research. Supervision is a supportive and collaborative journey between the student and the supervisor. However, there are complexities of postgraduate supervision pedagogy that are hardly explored in South Africa - the quality of supervision, time-to-degree, throughput rates, and perceived organisational support. Therefore, inadequate understanding of the elements constitutes supervision relationships issues for masters and doctoral students. Current practice falls short of addressing supervision praxis which necessitated this study to explore a tailored model of supervision. Therefore, how can experiences of masters, doctoral candidates and graduates assist to explain and propose an optimal postgraduate research supervision model that best supports the student success rates in South African universities? As a constructivist designed study, a quantitative digital survey and a snowball sampling method were used targeting masters and doctoral candidates and graduates across private and public universities in South Africa. An online survey was designed and administered using Microsoft Forms to over 500 participants. Descriptive statistical analysis was conducted measuring position in percentile rankings. Results elucidate the nature and main feature of postgraduate supervisory relationships in South Africa. We found that a postgraduate research supervision model can be tailored to the South African context, and we contribute to the development of postgraduate supervision model as pedagogical tool related to metacognitive strategies and humanising pedagogy for research supervisors and students.