Academic productivity and the impact of the national education philosophy in higher education institutions as viewed by Malaysian academics

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to highlight the valuable perspectives of Malaysian academics in the agenda for accessing productivity achievement and some other factors affecting it. This research is also about the National Education Philosophy (NEP) in terms of how successful its implementation on Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Malaysia is. The researcher draws eight major conclusions in answering the main research questions. The thesis argues that the most productive role among the academics is teaching, compared to research and administration. Also, different factors give significant effect to different academic roles. Only about 59% of the professors were thought to have been appointed on merit (deserve their appointment). About 35%, 30% and 12% of the respondents have fair, good and very good knowledge about NEP respectively. All NEP elements are considered well implemented, where each of them has an average rating of more than 3 in an increasing scale of 1-5 (least to most). The most frequent constraint among the academics for NEP to be implemented in HEI is the significant burdens that are time-consuming faced by them. There is a significant relationship between implementation success of NEP and administration productivity. Lastly, there is a significant relationship between the perspective of academics concerning professorial appointments and the successful implementation of NEP in HEI. However, the last two have modest correlation values in general. It is shown in the thesis that this is pioneering research because it is the first that has been conducted on a large scale involving academics in a single country. Furthermore, it is also the first research that has been conducted on academics in Malaysia by using an online survey questionnaire, an invention of a new procedure in Social Science research. The response rate of 42.43% looks very promising in comparison with similar procedures in the past. This study is also the first to look at the impacts of elements of NEP and their implementation in HEI in Malaysia. The study reveals the outcomes of academics' productivity by looking at their roles and the factors which affect their productivity, and the impacts of NEP in HEI alongside the possible constraints that could bring valuable positive indicators of the performance of current HEI in Malaysia as a whole.