Professional Training in Research Development

Tuesday, 19/01/2016

Writing an undergraduate or graduate thesis or dissertation is an inevitable requirement for university students. Students already familiar with academic writing, research methodology, and statistical analyses are more likely to earn their degrees on time. Many other students, however, view the final project as a nightmare. For these students, writing a final project poses problems that may lead to stress,prolonged study period, or even dropout,all of which are common academic problems in universities in Indonesia and worldwide.

While the way a student copes with research and academic writing problems may be a dominant cause, difficulties in writing a thesis or dissertation may also be attributed to the supervisor’s lack of methodological knowledge and skills.

Being aware of the prevalence of such problems, ITHB prepared a detailed plan to improve its lecturers’ skills. As part of a program called Professional Training in Research Methodology, ITHB recently invited Prof. Imam Ghozali, S.E., M. Comm., PhD.Ak., an expert in research methodology and statistics who have written numerous articles for national and international journals and books on statistics, to train and equip ITHB lecturers with better methodological and supervisory skills. Prof. Ghozali, who earned his undergraduate degree in Accounting from Universitas Gadjah Mada and his Doctoral degree also in accounting from an Australian university, is a respectable authority in the areas of research methodology and a number of application software programs including SPSS, Path Analysis, AMOS, Lisrel, PLS, and SEM.

Held at ITHB from 11 to 12 January 2016, the training started with an introduction to the inductive and deductive methods. Prof. Ghozali explained in detail the differences between qualitative and quantitative research. The session continued with how research should follow certain important stages, including Observation, Preliminary Data Gathering, Problem Definition, Theoretical Framework, Hypothesis, Research Design, Data Collection Analysis, and Deduction.

Thesis or dissertation supervisors who possess adequate methodological knowledge and skills can facilitate students to complete their final assignment in an apt, punctual manner. In another session of the training, Prof. Ghozali reinforced the lecturers’ skills in using various resources on the Internet that provide free access to international journals and textbooks that they and the students can use freely as their reference. Another important session of the training dealt with plagiarism and how to avoid it.

By continuously improving the lecturers’ competence, ITHB aims to ensure that its students have the widest opportunity to explore extensively useful world-class ideas in their final assignments.