Abstract:

Higher education is important in the creation/construction of a knowledge economy and societal development. The universities are charged with the creation of Knowledge and skills required for national development. In creating knowledge/skills, a lot of research has to be undertaken by both the universities and research centres. Research is one of the significant responsibilities of university education to foster sustainable development. This study therefore, looked at the influence of educational research on the development of universities in South-East, Nigeria. Three research questions and hypotheses were posed to guide the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey design with a population of 450 academic lecturers and 35 administrative lecturers in the faculty of education of all the federal universities in South-East, Nigeria. A sample of 135 academic lecturers and administrative lecturers was drawn using stratified random sampling technique, which represents 28% of the population. The instrument used for this study was questionnaire tagged “Educational Research and the Development of Universities’ Questionnaire (ERDUQ)” developed by the researchers. The instrument was validated and the reliability determined at 0.79 using test-retest method. Mean and rank order statistics were used to answer the research questions, while z-test was used to test the hypotheses. The findings of this study revealed among others that educational researches promote new knowledge among lecturers/students, help students improve on academic pursuit/innovations, support lecturers on knowledge creation, support innovative/creative developments in the schools, provide opportunities for networking/collaboration among institutions and industry, increase students’ participation to foster sustainable development. The challenges of educational research towards the development of universities include: poor educational facilities, inadequate information and technological devices in schools, poor/ irregular funding, declining research infrastructure, poor research motivation among the lecturers, rising workloads associated with deteriorating staff/student ratio, which leave little time for research, lack of modern research skills among the lecturers, and inadequate research personnel. Based on the findings, recommendations were made.

Keywords:

Educational research, research development, university development.