Postgraduate Research Workshop

Research is an integral part of the postgraduate training at University of Eldoret. Building a sound conceptual understanding of various research methods, research instruments, tools and techniques is essential for conducting meaningful empirical research. Postgraduate students are expected to undertake high quality research and publish their work in reputable journals. For one to achieve these, he/she must collect, interpret and logically document the information researched. The art of drawing coherent conclusions, supported by appropriate research tools and reference citation is vital for quality research work.

To help develop research and writing skills among the postgraduate students, the Board of Postgraduate studies and the Directorate of Research & Innovations headed by Prof. Beatrice Were conducted a training workshop at the University’s Main Campus on 10th January 2019. The workshop focused on two areas; ‘Ethics in Research and the Technical ABCs of Citation’ and ‘Responding to Research Proposal Calls’. A total of 109 students attended the workshop. Also present were staff representatives from different schools.

Dr. Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, currently teaching at the Community college of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a Faculty Fellow at the Honors College, University of Pittsburg facilitated the session on ethics in research. In an interactive session that featured presentation and practical activities, Dr. Anyango-Kivuva discussed the challenge of plagiarism as an ethical concern in scholarly research and writing, and provided guidance on how to avoid it. The resource person recommended rephrasing sentences, paraphrasing and proper referencing as means to produce good, original academic scripts while avoiding plagiarism.

Prof Linnet Gohole of the School of Agriculture & Biotechnology, University of Eldoret walked the students through the key requirements and steps in proposal writing for grant sourcing. The whole ‘Research Process’ was discussed along with its elements such as defining the problem; developing the approach to the problem and formulation of a suitable research design. The ingredients of the various research design with details on data collection were described.

The students felt the workshop was very resourceful as it partially prepared them to develop their research projects. More training workshops will be organized to further develop their scholarly skills.