there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

this study purported to compare and contrast the use of self-mention and evidentials as two mtadiscourse features in opinion columns of persian and english newspapers. the theoretical basis of this study is the idea that metadiscourse features vary across cultural boundaries. for this purpose, 150 persian and 150 english opinion columns were collected based on three factors of topic, audience a...

the present study sought to investigate the impact of using mind-mapping technique instruction on female elementary efl learners reading comprehension; it also investigated their attitudes towards using mind-mapping technique as a tool to improve their reading comprehension. this study followed a quasi-experimental design with two intact groups as experimental, and control groups. the participa...

the study reflected in this thesis aims at finding out relationships between critical thinking (ct), and the reading sections of tofel and ielts tests. the study tries to find any relationships between the ct ability of students and their performance on reading tests of tofel and academic ielts. however, no research has ever been conducted to investigate the relationship between ct and the read...

the purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of instruction through debate on male and female efl learners’ reading comprehension, to examine the differences between the performance of male and female participants on the five dimensions of cctst including analysis, evaluation, inference, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning, and to examine the differences between male ...

this research aims at answering the questions about translation problems and strategies applied by translators when translating cultural concepts. in order to address this issue, qualitative and quantitative study were conducted on two groups of subjects at imam reza international university of mashhad. these two groups were assigned as beginner and advanced translation students (10 students). ...

according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

employees always concern about losing their job , or in other word , losing their income resources. for this purpose, every government requires strong system for covering these concerns. the unemployment insurance (ui) program’s can be used for achieving this goal. in this thesis, we price ui based on the insurance history of employee and the duration of being unemployed. we use the weibull dis...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

implicit and unobserved errors and vulnerabilities issues usually arise in cryptographic protocols and especially in authentication protocols. this may enable an attacker to make serious damages to the desired system, such as having the access to or changing secret documents, interfering in bank transactions, having access to users’ accounts, or may be having the control all over the syste...