JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND PLANNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Year:2008 | Volume:13 | Issue:4 (46)|Papers Count:8

The "1988 Act of Establishing Boards of Trustees for Iranian Universities and Higher Education Institutions" has defined fourteen responsibilities and functions for boards of trustees. The present study is designed and conducted to evaluate responsibilities and functions of public universities' boards of trustees affiliated to Ministry of Science, Research & Technology. Using stratified random sampling, 20 universities were selected and 237 minutes of meetings during 1991-2006 with 3501 agendas were contently analyzed.Results of this study revealed that most decisions in these meetings were made regarding to faculties and financial affairs, and only 14 percents of approvals were related to policy making. In general, all universities functioned similary, but type 1 universities showed more activities in approval of administrative organization (p<0.019) and fund raising (p<0.046).

The purpose of this study is to emphasis on necessity of change in organizations, particularly in the organization which is responsible for integrating policy making and implementation of programs in Islamic Republic of Iran. Also the application of Change in the organization development context is supervise from top and has an imperative nature.This phenomenon has a long range plan which cover whole system. In fact, organizational development is a managerial effect which aims the change in vision, values, believes and in general "organizational culture". This effort can be considered an appropriate method in implementation of such changes. Finally distinction and differentiation between the institutes that govern higher education with others must be considered in application of organizational development.

The purpose of this study is apprizing and determining of organizational learning in Agriculture and Natural Resources campus of University of Tehran. The set of elements of organizational learning process, kinds of organizational learning and characteristics of learning organization was used as theatrical framework. The data used in this study had come from a random systemic sampling of 93 faculty members and questionnaire was research instrument. Hypothesis of the study was tested using factor analysis.The finding of the study indicated that single loop learning, management and personal capabilities have the most important role and shire in amount of organizational learning level. Finding also showed that team, organization and action learning are next priorities respectively. Based on findings, it seems that encouragement and support of team working as implementing interdisciplinary researches and projects, establishing scientific and research networks in local, national and international levels are the most strategic activities toward enhancing generative, reflection and action learning in institutes of agricultural studies.

This study aims at evaluating service quality in Educational Centers of University of Payam Noor in East and West Azerbaijan provinces. In this research, the required data were collected from a sample of 384 students on two aspects of perception and expectation using SERVQUAL Model with regard to service quality of educational centers.The research findings indicate significant and negative gap between students' perception and expectation of services quality of educational centers among all factors and dimensions of the model, using t-test (P=0/001). This means that students are not satisfied with the service quality of educational centers of Payam Noor University. Meanwhile, the mean of the students' overall perception is 2.68 (below average) and their expectation is 4.44 (above high). A comparison between student’s gender and seniority (sophomores and field) didn't reveal any differences. A comparison of field of study it- was revealed that there is a significant difference in f-test between students of computer sciences and others.

The concept of evaluation plays a critical role in recognition of the existing situation and finding out the extent to which the objectives of organizations have been achieved and as a result, improving the organizational efficiency.Moreover the performance evaluation is an outstanding element which provides the grounds for improving the existing processes and promoting the organization's profile by highlighting the improvable areas as well as the potential threats and strong and weak points.Following the approval of the "Regulation of Administrative Organizations Performance Evaluation" by the Cabinet and the establishment of an evaluation system in all the administrative departments and foundations across the nation. The Ministry of Science, Research and Technology also developed and established its macro-level performance evaluation system for both administrative and academic sections during the academic years of 2001-02 and 2003-04.After reviewing the related literature both inside and outside the country, a list of potential evaluation factors and indicators was prepared. Further, the Modified Analytic Hierarchy process was used to determine the weights of the factors and indicators were identified. The shortlist consisted of 6 factors and 11 indicators for the academic section and 7 factors and 23 indicators for the administrative section. Following the design, production and distribution of the questionnaire, the target data were collected to be analyzed for the changes during 3 academic years based on the 'descriptive statistics method'.The research outcomes show that most of the evaluation indicators, for both administrative and academic sections, were on a growing trend; and while a number of indicators appeared declining, the overall path could be titled as satisfactory with regard to the Ministry's policies.

The purpose of this descriptive- correlational research is to investigate the amount of research productivity of faculty members in Razi University and determine factors that explain it. The population for the study included all full time, PhD faculties employed by Razi University (N=161). Based on the results, the mean faculty research productivity score was 6.13. The median value (2.8) showed that the half of faculties has yearly lower than research score, and the other half have more than this value. The regression analysis revealed that three variables explained 31% of the variance in research productivity. These variables included academic rank, age, and numbers of children.

Any social purposive action has unanticipated consequences as well as intended results. Customerism and commercialization of scientific activities have had a lot of advantages but we must not ignore the manifest and latent dysfunctions in higher education. In this article, we examine normative structure of science, university managers' orientation, social prestige of faculty members, scientific freedom principles, teaching - learning process and curriculum relationship with commercialization. Knowing about these consequences enables educational managers to benefit from opportunity and avoid threats.