Graduate Students’ Skills and Challenges in Research Writing

Abstract

The most challenging problem encountered by graduate students during their study is the postgraduate research and thesis writing. This descriptive research design was employed to investigate research skills and challenges encountered by graduate students in research writing. The respondents of the study were the randomly selected students at the College of Education-Graduate School of the Iloilo State College of Fisheries who are in their thesis and dissertation writing. The data-gathering instrument was a researcher-made questionnaire. Part I of the instrument assessed the research skills which includes information seeking skills, problem solving skills, methodology skills, analysis skills, writing skills, and communication skills. Part II focused on the challenges encountered by graduate students in doing research.  Data gathered were analyzed using frequency, mean, standard deviation, t-test and ANOVA. The .05 alpha level was used as the criterion for the acceptance or rejection of the null hypotheses. Results revealed that graduate students have excellent information seeking skills, problem solving skills, writing skills and communication skills. Methodology and analysis skills are the least skills acquired by students. It was found that the extremely serious problems faced by graduate students in conducting research are poor time management, financial problem, lack of cooperation of respondents, difficulty in identifying research issue, lack of ICT facilities to analyze the data, contradicting/ conflicting ideas between researcher and adviser, and lack of commitment of researcher. It can be concluded that graduate students have not fully mastered the research methodology skills and data analysis skills. They experienced several limitations and challenges. Poor time management is the most critical challenge.