Assessing the Critical Reading Skills of Postgraduate Students: Perspectives of Supervisors and Supervisees

The advent of the Information Age witnessed the democratization and massification of higher education in the twenty-first century all around the globe. Despite the significant increase in postgraduate study, attrition rates have been rather high, whilst graduate completion rates continue to fall. One of the reasons cited has been students’ incompetency to handle postgraduate study due to their limited academic literacy and research skills. Critical reading skills are often viewed as a fundamental pillar for postgraduate study. Therefore, the main aim of this paper was to assess the postgraduate students’ critical reading skills from the perspectives of both students and their supervisors. This descriptive study involved 209 postgraduate students and 121 supervisors from two local public universities in Malaysia. Data were collected using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that there was a significant difference in the assessment of critical reading skills of postgraduate students from the perspectives of supervisors and postgraduate students. Students perceived that they had a higher moderate level of readiness compared to supervisors. Supervisors also felt that students possessed limited readiness in terms of critical reading skills such as questioning and evaluating texts. These results have implications for the need for innovative approaches to advance the critical reading skills of postgraduate students.