The Influencing Mechanism Of Academic Masters’ Scholarly Activities

With the strategic center being turned from scale expansion to improving training quality, some scholars have been exploring the training principles of the academic masters from the perspectives of enrollment system, mentoring relationship and curriculum of graduate students. Although some related researches do have some beneficial achievements, the lack of systemic research which discusses the influencing mechanism between input(such as student quality, mentoring relationship) and output(such as publications), is harmful to the further grasp of training principles. Aiming at solving this problem, based on the predictor model of scholarly activities overseas and the researches on the influencing factors of academic masters’ academic productivity, the influencing mechanism of Chinese academic masters’ scholarly activities is explored.According to the social cognitive theory of occupation, the theory of training environment and the predictor model of scholarly activities, the literature on the influencing factors of graduates’ academic productivity is carded and commented. Then, it sorts out such factors as proactive personality, conscientiousness personality, academic identity of the mentor and the mentoring numbers as the new predictive variables of scholarly activities influencing mechanism and gives an analysis on it. After inducing researches related to the influencing factors of scholarly activities, based on the empirical research and theoretical analysis, it puts forwards 22 hypotheses and constructs the influencing mechanism model of “input-mediator-output”.As to the measurement, it applies Chinese mature questionnaires or modified Chinese version of foreign questionnaires to measure proactive personality, conscientiousness personality and research interest; through item analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, it revises some foreign questionnaires into the Chinese version and forms the measurement tools suitable for Chinese academic masters. Those questionnaires include the Research Training Environment Scale-Short Form, Advisory Working Alliance Inventory—Student Version, Research Self-Efficacy Scale, Research Outcome Expectations Questionnaire-Short Form, Interest in Research Questionnaire and Scholarly Activity Scale. By the test of reliability and validity, these revised questionnaires are proved to accord with the requirements of psychological measurement.With the method of structural equation model, it tests the hypothesized route and the goodness of fitting of the hypothesized model and modifies the influencing mechanism model of scholarly activities.Based on the above research, the dissertation comes to the following conclusions:(1)Environmental factors like advisory working alliance, mentor academic identity, research training environment and so on could influence scholarly activities indirectly through mediating variables such as research interest, research outcome expectations, research self-efficacy. Among them, advisory working alliance has a positive influence on research outcome expectations and research self-efficacy; mentor academic identity has a positive influence on research self-efficacy, but it has no obvious effect on research outcome expectations; research training environment has a positive influence on research interest, but it has no obvious effect on research self-efficacy and research outcome expectations. Among the three environmental factors, advisory working alliance has the strongest effect on scholarly activities. The mentoring numbers is proved to have no obvious effect on research self-efficacy.(2)Individual factors like proactive personality, conscientious personality and investigative personality influence scholarly activities indirectly through mediating variables such as research interest, research outcome expectations and research self-efficacy. Among them, proactive personality has a positive influence on research outcome expectations, research self-efficacy and research interest; conscientious personality has a positive influence on research self-efficacy; investigative personality has a positive influence on research outcome expectations, but it has no obvious effect on research outcome expectations and research interest. Among the three individual factors, proactive personality has the strongest effect on scholarly activities, and investigative personality has the weakest influence.Based on the above results, combined with the current situation of China’s graduate education, it proposes some suggestions, from the perspectives of the universities, the mentors and the graduates, that the universities can make some improvement in the enrollment, mentor management, curriculum, environment improvement and monitoring system, that the mentors can make some improvement in the selection of graduates, the training objectives and the mentoring, and that the graduates can make some efforts in the choice of the mentor and advisory working alliance.