Ensuring quality in educational research

Research is an enquiry process that has clearly defined parameters. It has its aim as the discovery or creation of knowledge, theory building, testing, confirmation, revision, refutation of knowledge and theory or investigation of a problem for local decision making. Presently research itself is suffering from lack of quality. No doubt, academic interest in the activity of research has been growing, at the same time, with the expansion of research; the concept of quality has suffered to a good deal. Due to unprecedented spurt in research and obscured concern for the quality except in few exceptional cases, the output of work is marked by mediocrity or poor quality. Though, UGC has taken several steps to improve the quality of research which includes raising of the amount of money available to research scholars and improvement of supervision and evaluation and making minimum standards for the awards of M.Phil./Ph.D. degree regulation(2009), but this much is not enough. The quality needs some more efforts. Quality control in research is thus not only important but also very urgent. In this paper, an attempt has been made to discuss the lacuna of research briefly with the present status of research in India and some suggestions have been given in order to improve the quality of research and ultimately the quality of educational practices.