Conducted by MSEUF
, Started on 2014 -
Completed on 2015
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Integrating research into the academic life of faculty and research staff in higher education institutions in the Philippines is not an easy task. In fact, it would be closer to the truth to say that most higher education institutions need to rely on their own initiatives and resourcefulness to meet the research mandate and the ascribed function of universities as generators of knowledge for national development.
Higher education institutions in Region IV-A (Calabarzon) are no exception to this. They have had to rely on their own internal resources, political will and generated policies to create, develop and maintain a culture culminating in research ferment that eventually drove the academic culture to accept research as part of the normal faculty functions, along with instruction and community extension.
Forty-five participants in six universities in Region IV-A (Calabarzon), from the Vice Presidents for Research and Development or equivalent officer, the deans, the active cadre of faculty researchers, the information technology and library directors, and the members of the ethics policy committee or equivalent officer were interviewed to extract grounded data utilizing the constant comparison method and analyzing the interviews to elicit the framework for creating, developing and sustaining research culture using actual cases or responses from the field.
But while there were elements of research culture extant in the institutions studied, the research participants of the study – vice presidents for research or research directors, deans, faculty researchers, IT and library directors and intellectual property rights committee members were not very confident that they were strong or mature enough to be called an academic research culture, except for one state university known for its global research track record. Even if there were elements and indicators of research culture in their respective institutions, their research cultures were still evolving or in transition, and needed further institutional push to become fully grown.
The study recommends that HEIs seriously take into account the typology of higher education institutions proposed by the Commission on Higher Education to determine whether they will be professional or research institutions to prevent the dissipation of energy and scarce funds and to harmonize the extant realities prevalent among the faculty that are overloaded, inadequately trained to do research, and find difficulty meeting the institutional policy of research requirement for faculty ranking and promotion.
Furthermore, it is recommended that the reward system be rationalized, inter-institutional collaboration be strengthened to create a strong pool of theoretically-oriented scholars with enhanced research skills, opportunities for inter- and multidisciplinary researches be provided led by mature research universities (the Philippine Higher Education Research Networks (PHERNETs), for example) and the maturing ones or transiting into maturity (the Higher Education Regional Research Centers (HERRCs) to mentor the budding research skills of HEIs that are starting to build their research culture and that ethical and IPR-related issues be addressed to support thriving research environments.
More recently, CHED introduced the idea that not all HEIs need to undertake research as the typology of higher education institutions shows. This resonates with Boyer’s (1990) suggestion of expanding the definition of scholarship not only to mean research but also the scholarship of integration, of application and of teaching.