The Research Authority promotes research activity among faculty members by assisting them in their efforts to obtain grants from external sources, by managing their research budgets, and by helping them disseminate their research findings. The authority regularly circulates information regarding funding opportunities, national and international conferences, and calls for papers from academic journals among faculty members and provides assistance in submitting research proposals, papers for conferences, and journal articles.
Since 2004, the Research Authority has published an annual report of faculty members’ research activities, which includes a list of books, book chapters, journal articles, and papers presented at professional conferences during that year. The annual report also contains references to the art exhibitions given by artists who teach at Hamidrasha and lists the educational materials developed by the college’s pedagogical specialists. Faculty publications are in Hebrew, English, Arabic, and occasionally in other languages such as German and French.
Research at Beit Berl College spans a wide range of subjects and areas, including education, teacher training, biology, environmental and agriculture studies, mathematics education, language acquisition, special education, school counseling, history, criminology, gender, and English as a second language, and reflects the use of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Some faculty members have conducted research abroad (for example, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Germany, and Turkey), generally in collaboration with colleagues from those countries. The college recently began exploring the possibility of conducting research with partner countries within the framework of the European Union.
The Research Authority’s Research and Publication Committee is responsible for awarding research grants to college faculty for small-scale projects as well as providing financial assistance to help cover the costs of publishing research findings.