Graduate Research Disseminations: The UCC Experience

Abstract

The university's educational structure culminates in graduate study. As a result, it highlights the university’s most outstanding academic and intellectual products and processes. It needs to be structured to improve higher education's quality, efficiency, and effectiveness by assuring its relevance and responsiveness to the education system's development needs and regional and national development thrusts. Graduate education improves the quality of universities and Philippine higher education toward global competitiveness and world-class scholarship. With these, the researchers assessed the profile of the Union Christian College Graduate School research along with the field of the study, program, and focus of the study, and the extent of dissemination of these studies conducted from the School Year 2015-2016 to School Year 2019-2020. The study utilized the descriptive method of research with documentary analysis. The findings showed that during the covered school years of the study, a total of 93 graduate theses were successfully conducted at Union Christian College, including 42 from the Master of Arts in Education major in Teacher Education; 24 from the Master of Arts in Nursing; and 17 from the Master of Arts in Education major in Preschool Education. As to the focus of the study, the MAED theses accounted for the following: the top three focuses included localized and contextualized instructional material development (highest), instructional performance evaluation, and educational program development, while the lowest focuses included home-school relations and evaluation of value-education initiatives in schools. From the MAN Program, the research studies focused on evaluating community health practices (highest), nurses' professional development, and evaluation of healthcare services. In contrast, the lowest focuses included evaluating social and healthcare programs and assessing the status of the nursing career in the private and district hospitals in La Union. Along with the documented dissemination programs for the graduate research studies, in terms of dissemination in print, local printing of research journals registered the highest in both programs, followed by online journal publications. In terms of research presentations to conferences and colloquia, local, national, and international presentations shared an equal aggregate. Finally, MAED Teacher Education registered the highest research dissemination (highest), followed by MAED Pre-School Education and the MAN program. Both are fairly satisfactory. Given the above scenario, it is concluded that the UCC Graduate Programs have taken off in disseminating its research findings in the knowledge community. This take-off must be sustained, and evaluating the status of research utilization is sought to further research culture.