Designing Technology for Doctoral Persistence and Well-Being: Findings from a Two-Country Value-Sensitive Inquiry into Student Progress.

Doctoral education suffers from widespread dropout and well-being problems, for which we have not yet found scalable and generalizable interventions. This paper characterizes these problems as amenable to technology-enhanced learning (TEL) intervention and derives design knowledge for such solutions. We conducted two iterations of design-based research using a value-sensitive design approach to understand how technology could support doctoral progress, well-being, and persistence, with 19 doctoral students from multiple disciplines in Estonia and Spain. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis of questionnaires, interviews, and diary data confirms prior research about the importance of perceiving progress in the dissertation materials. They also highlight the uniqueness and self-direction of the doctoral journey, and particular (but well-defined) external factors that could be targeted by TEL support. Our design-oriented findings can inform the development of multiple TEL solutions to address these problems. Further, the particular methods used to elicit these findings both illustrate the added value of value-sensitive design for the field of TEL and provide examples of techniques that can be used to be mindful of stakeholder values when designing learning technologies.