Educational research presented strong growth in the last decades. However, there are doubts about the quality of this production and of its further developments. This study is part of a broader research having as main purpose to evaluate the quality of theses and dissertations defended between 2000 and 2004 whose focus of investigation were 13 undergraduate programs in seven fields of knowledge. A survey on data bases permitted to locate 436 works related to higher education, of which 36 were considered as the most relevant for this research. For the present paper, after the readings and re-readings of the material, we made an analysis by units, having as reference 10 categories defined after detailed examination of twelve works randomly selected. The results obtained indicated levels of quality superior to those previously hypothesized. The authors were interviewed in order to identify the developments of their researches in terms of publication of results, contribution to higher education and advancement of their academic careers.
Graduate studies; Theses. Dissertations; Higher education
