A study of practices and problems in promoting research at university level
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Date
2014
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Publisher
UMT.Lahore
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to get awareness of the present practices of research at university level. Pakistan has no standing in the field of research as teachers concentrate on text available in the market and the students memorize the same and reproduce that in the exams. Further fabrication and falsification, plagiarism and using unpublished material and self-plagiarism have crept in our university research practices. The other problems in way of promoting research in universities are absence of research agenda, poor research strategies of the departments, inadequate allocation of funds for research, poor infrastructure, improper linkage with other institutions, weak communication of research benefits and lack of proper research monitoring. Seven universities were selected as sample and the teachers involved in research activities were taken as subjects of the study to respond to the questionnaire. The questionnaire, administered by research personally, consisted of 30 questions, was categorized into five factors, the face validity of which was determined through experts. After data analysis, the researcher concluded that plagiarism and theft of the data etc. are very popular among the researchers. Whereas, allocation of insufficient funds for research, lack of well managed and well equipped libraries and academic workload on researcher etc. are real obstacles in the way of promoting research at university level. These responses show the intensity of the problems and clarify that if someone wants to promote research at university level, then serious measures have to be adopted with a view to eradicate these problems and rectify the situation. It was also explored through the study that demographic variables of teachers like age, experience of research, positon of teacher, status of organization and professional qualification are not playing any significant role in views of the teachers. The views of the teachers, however, have been affected by the demographic variable of gender and a significant difference can be seen in the views of male teachers and those of female teachers.