Development and evaluation of research productivity curriculum for phd students

The purpose of this study was to develop, implement, and evaluate a curriculum that aims to support research productivity of PhD students. In this research, a fully mixed concurrent dominant status research design were used and a curriculum development-evaluation model was designed based on different curriculum development and evaluation models. The model was basically composed of four stages. These stages were 1)need analysis, 2)composing a draft curriculum and development, 3)implementation of the curriculum and, 4)evaluation and restructuring of the curriculum. The study group of the research involved students who continue their PhD education at Gaziosmanpaşa University Graduate Schools of Social Sciences, Educational Sciences, Natural and Applied Sciences and Health Sciences, faculty members who currently offer or have offered PhD courses and institute directors who have PhD programs at their institutes. In need analysis part of the study, research data were gathered using need analysis questionnaires and interview forms and in the main study,open-ended questionnaires, interview forms and observation forms were used during the application of the curriculum. In addition, the 'Attitudes toward Research' scale developed by Papanastasiou (2005) and adapted to Turkish by Yapalak and Ilgaz (2013) was administered as a pre-test just before the implementation of the curriculum and as a post-test about two months after the implementation. Qualitative data of the study was analyzed using descriptive analysis method using MaxQda software while quantitative data were analyzed with dependent samples t-test by using SPSS 22 package program. The top five topics asserted by the students, faculty members, and institute directors during the need analysis were included in the curriculum. These topics were 'Development of Academic Writing Skills and Publication Process', 'Development of Thinking Skills', 'Studying Strategies', 'Cooperation and Academic Networking', and 'Access to Financial Resources'. After preliminary consideration of the objectives, content, learning-teaching process and evaluation of these identified topics by curriculum practitioners, curriculum and instruction experts and PhD students, the curriculum was put into its final form. The curriculum was implemented for 3 days as workshops in the morning and the afternoon. Program evaluation was carried out concurrently with the program implementation. In the curriculum evaluation part, positive, negative and improvable aspects of the curriculum as well as how the sessions contributed to the research productivity of the students were examined. Curriculum practitioners and participants indicated that the curriculum had the objectives and content that were responsive to the needs of PhD students to improve their research productivity. In the learning-teaching process, application of workshop practices, question-answer technique and collaborative/group works were indicated as positive aspects of the curriculum. In the evaluation part of the curriculum, immediate feedback and corrections from the practitioners were seen as positive aspects. Participants also stated that the curriculum provided students with the opportunity to socialize and get to know each other, and to increase the interest, desire, effort and motivation toward research. The negative aspects as well as the positive aspects of the curriculum were mentioned. It is one of the criticisms that more time was needed because of the intense objectives and content of the curriculum. It was also mentioned that the practical teaching techniques should be included in the sessions where the lecturing method was frequently used. It was also stated that, in evaluation part, there were students who did not get enough feedback and correction due to time constraints. The results from 'Attitudes Toward Research' scale showed that there was no statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test of 'research usefulness for profession', 'research anxiety' and 'positive attitudes toward research' factors while there were statistically significant difference between pre-test and post-test of 'relevance to life' and 'research difficulty' factors in favor of post-test. As a result of the evaluations, the curriculum was restructured by taking into consideration the objectives, content, learning-teaching process and evaluation, time and physical atmosphere, application process and time schedule of the curriculum. In the last part of the study, some suggestions were made for the implementation and suggesstions for the future studies are presented. Keywords: research productivity, PhD students, currciulum development, curriculum evaluation.