A general framework for selecting appropriate criteria of student as research assistant using fuzzy delphi method

Abstract

This research aims to build a general framework for choosing the most appropriate set of criteria for recruiting student as a research assistant in a university research project. University researchers could benefit from such a framework because it could optimize the costs of research while also enhancing students research skills. In the same time, it is also essential that the quality of research ought to measure up to the grants provided by the university. Nevertheless, it is a challenging problem for many research supervisors in the selection of qualified research assistants. In this paper, we attempted to resolve this problem by building a general framework for selecting the appropriate criteria in the evaluation of student performance. We explored earlier studies on the proposed evaluation criteria of the research assistant and identified 47 most impactful criteria criteria. We obtained experts in engineering and information technology fields from two universities to answer questionnaires to identify their commonly used criteria for grant research assistant (GRA). Then, all the identified criteria were evaluated using the fuzzy delphi method (FDM) for finding the best fitting criteria which resulted in 16 most impactful criteria.