Implementing Create a-Research-Space (CARS) Framework: A Matter of Internal Quality Assurance

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Nasreen Hussain  

Ever since the establishment of Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, funds have been pouring in Pakistan to give a boost to higher education and increase the number of PhDs. Concentrated efforts are being put in by HEC to encourage quality research by facilitating all universities to increase the number of PhD candidates. The aim of this research study was to evaluate PhD theses in education available on official HEC website and to find out the academic writing and organizational skills used by the candidates. Eight PhD theses were randomly selected from the four provinces of Pakistan. Qualitative research was opted using document analysis to give voice and meaning to the academic work and Create a-Research-Space (CARS) framework developed by Swales and Feak (1994) was used as the basis of data analysis. Introduction chapters were examined to study the moves used by the students, which included establishing a research territory, establishing a niche and occupying the niche. Overall findings indicated that the moves were ignored to quite an extent, thereby affecting the quality of academic writing and the impact on the production of theses. The findings raise two very pertinent questions: Do the supervisors lack overall research skills, thereby lowering the quality of academic work of the students or is it ignorance on their part? The findings of the study will be helpful to the supervisors as well as the research students to use appropriate moves during the supervision process as proposed by Swales and Feak.