308
studies and programmes of research in India. Needless to add research on higher
education benefitted more from research undertaken in departments and institutions
other than department of education in the universities.
Trends in Educational Research in India
Most of the research in education continues to be empirical in nature and quantita-
tive in orientation. The empirical character of education research seems to charac-
terize bulk of educational research in India (Mitra 1987 ). This trend continued even
in the recent decades. The decade of 1990s saw a large number of studies in educa-
tion in India partly due to external aid flow especially to primary education under
the district primary education programme (Varghese 1996 ). Most of the studies
under these programmes were not only empirical in nature but also were making
assessments of impacts of interventions to scale up the interventions in bringing
children to schools or enhancing their levels of learning.
Ever since pedagogy became a full subject of study, teacher training and teaching-
learning process continue to be the main trust of all research activities in education
in India (Buch and Govinda 1987 ). This is also because it was strongly believed that
educational research aims at obtaining experimental methods, knowledge and edu-
cational practices and processes which could be used for reconstructing educational
programmes in our country (Buch and Yadav 1974 ).
An analysis of an educational research in India indicates that most of the research
has primarily been of academic nature and rarely attempts have been carrying out
studies having policy implications. Input for the formulation of educational policy
in India has mainly come from the reports of the Commissions and Committees,
Five-Year Plans, All India Educational Surveys, etc. (Khaparde 2002 ). This was
primarily because a major share of education research was carried out in the educa-
tion departments of universities, and the preoccupation of these departments was on
issues related to pedagogy, curriculum and teacher training.
The major shift one notices in education research is the increase in research con-
tributions by departments other than education. This increase in research output by
other departments was reflected in terms of doctoral studies and dissertations,
research projects, articles in journals and books and other research publications.
The research orientation and focus of the departments other than education was dif-
ferent from that of the education departments. While educational departments of
universities mostly focussed on issues related to teacher, curriculum,
teaching- learning and use of technology in education, the social sciences depart-
ments engaged in education research focussed on interface of education with soci-
ety, economy and individuals. In fact, the social scientist from other departments
relied on tools and methodology borrowed from their parent disciplines and expand-
ing knowledge base of their parent disciplines rather than enriching the domain of
knowledge generation in education.
N.V. Varghese