A Framework for Research Supervision

Abstract

One of the main challenges that are encountered in research development is the management of research activities. Supervisors often have difficulties in managing schedules, issues and supervision of different research activities. This is compounded by students’ poor research skills. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a knowledge management framework to point out, track, and monitor various research supervision activities. The proposed framework consists of two layers, abstract and detail. The abstract layer consists of six stages which are; basement stage, review stage, data collection stage, data analysis stage, development stage, and testing and validation stage. These stages, according to our framework, are mandatory; in other words, any research must go through the stages. To complete the task of each stage, a number of steps are defined, which constitute the detail layer. A supervisor is able to pick up appropriate steps (and not all suggested steps) from the detail layer since the complexity varies from one research to another. We discuss the results of our findings in conceiving the framework.

Keywords: research development, development stage, research activities, supervision management