Preliminary Exploratory Research on Student Initiatives at Thai Universities

Abstract

The active learning methods are increasingly fit into curriculums of the leading educational institutions. Does the Thai educational system follow the trend? The brief literature review suggests that this topic is somehow neglected or unsought in the current scholarly research in Thailand. As so, this study aims to determine how are the things with student initiatives in the higher education system of Thailand. The observational survey research employed self-administered questionnaires to collect data from 469 students of 60 Thai universities selected with the application of non-probability convenience and voluntary response sampling techniques. The findings suggest that out of 469 respondents, 147 participated in some ‘real’ projects, 153 reported the presence of ideas worthy for subsequent development, whereas 270 believed to have something suitable for being published in journals. The further crosstabulation analysis revealed that all these students of the same cohort. It means that there were only 17 students out of 469 who, in one or another way involved into ‘serious’ projects, six of whom have some ideas worthy of further development, three got something worthy to be published, and two who could remember the names of the ‘serious’ periodic. The brief literature review suggests that the current topic is somehow neglected or unsought in the current scholarly research in Thailand. Therefore, the researcher has every reason to believe that this study is intended to fill this gap and thus, shed light on some problems of the higher education system of Thailand.