COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PhD DISSERTATIONS ON EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

The study focused on the evaluation of PhD dissertations on education in Pakistan and the comparison of dissertations conducted under HEC and UGC. The objectives of the research were; to explore the quality of research in Pakistan, to compare the quality of research of HEC and UGC, and to design instrument for the evaluation of research dissertations. All the PhD dissertations of social sciences identified the target population and from that population the researcher selected education discipline. Total PhD dissertations of education consist of 308, the researcher further delimited the study to all those dissertations that were downloadable with required permissions and fulfilled the evaluation criteria of the rubric. After the exclusion of dissertations, a total 178 dissertation were left for evaluation on the rubric. The researcher adapted and developed the rubric from different rubrics developed for evaluation of dissertations. The researcher collected data using 20 points instrument sheet with five point’s categorical scale, namely Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and Not included scale. For every dissertation one sheet was used, of the 178 dissertations, 131 were from HEC and 47 were from UGC. For the analysis of data the researcher used two methods, one was percentage while the other was statistical software to test the hypothesis which posed in the introduction section. The result of the study showed that in general the performance of HEC dissertation is slightly better than UGC; but statistically the result is not significant. The item wise result shows that there is significant difference on the majority items that prove the hypothesis that the research quality improved after the establishment of HEC in a vi short span of time of 10 Years whereas the number of dissertations increased by more than doubled in just 10 years. Before the establishment of HEC, only one dissertation touched the level of excellent whereas after the establishment of HEC, 10 dissertations were placed in excellent category while a substantial number of dissertations were in good category very close to excellent in a short span of time. The researcher suggests that there should be anti-plagiarism section in every department to avert plagiarism. Every faculty member should be provided anti-plagiarism software to eliminate the chances of plagiarism. The researcher also suggests that HEC should make it compulsory for every research department to publish their research journal. The researcher also feels the need of research on the evaluation of research journals in Pakistan.