Teaching development grants final and financial report: Adaptation of Student Research Experience Questionnaire (SREQ) for evaluation of higher degree research supervision in HKIEd

There has been substantial increase in the number and proportion of research students in recent years worldwide, especially in Asian countries. Assuring the quality of research supervision is of utmost important to tertiary institutions. With UGC-funding, HKIEd recruited the first cohort of research postgraduate (RPg) students in June 2010; they will start their research project in the next few months. Moreover, quite a few of the Institute's EdD students who entered the programme when it was launched in 2007 are also in their thesis stage. It is therefore timely to consider how research supervision will be evaluated at HKIEd. There are several approaches to evaluate research supervision, namely, reflection, interview, analysis of outcomes of the research process, and using a questionnaire. The aim of this project is to develop an instrument for the above-mentioned purpose. The Student Research Experience Questionnaire (SREQ) is widely used in the UK and Australia for evaluating the quality of research supervision, and one of the very few existing instruments with robust psychometric properties. This project will attempt to adapt, with revision if necessary, SREQ for use at HKIEd. On the other hand, little is known about the appropriateness and usefulness of SREQ in the Asian context, specifically in universities in Mainland Chinese. Hence, it is also our objective to translate the instrument into Chinese and perform a comprehensive validation using Item Response Theory.