RESEARCH PROGRAMS IN HEIS AND THEIR BENEFITS FOR THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

The research activities are considered a pillar to foster social, economic, and technological developments. Under this context, it appears to be a lack of information of the ways research activities are shared between educational stages (e.g., graduate, undergraduate and high school stages). More importantly is to identify the main benefits of such research activities for the general academic community. In this way, the purpose of this research was to analyze the research actions and strategies that HEIs carried out and benefits they represent for the academic community.
The assumption underlying this work is that the research activities carried out at HEIs have some unidentified benefits and positive impacts in the academic community at lower educational stages (LES). In this way, the research method was qualitative and interviews were carried out with postgraduate program coordinators and researchers. The data collected from interviews were firstly analysed with Atlas TI using category analysis and then SPSS for descriptive statistics. Limitations of this research rely on the few interviews carried out. For this reason, the research findings cannot be generalized, but research insights may be of some help to other researchers when analyzing the benefits that research activities at HEIs have at lower educational stages.
The main results show that there are limited institutional research policies at HEIs to benefit lower educational stages. Since the research activities at HEIs are focused mainly on the research areas of the programs, there is little intention to link those actives with the needs of lower educational stages (LES). However, there are indirect benefits at those LES derived from the research activities carried out. In conclusion HEIs carried out research activities and programs to satisfy their own needs for generating knowledge and those activities appear to benefit indirectly LES, particularly at undergraduate levels. It also means those benefits have positive impacts on learning processes at schools and social learning with the general community. Thus, it can be said that research activities and strategies provide some direct and indirect benefits for the academic community.