At their annual meeting during 1987, the heads of the Departments of Nursing at South African Universities discussed the sub-division of Nursing Science. They identified the following problems in this regard: (1) There was no consensus amongst nursing leaders about which sub-disciplines make up the academic disciplines of nursing. (2) This made it difficult to communicate with agencies outside ...

“Interdisciplinarity” is now a buzzword for more than 40 years since Erich Jantsch coined the term for a broader audience, together with “transdisciplinarity” (Jantsch 1970; see also Apostel et al. 1972). The exact meaning of these and related terms seems to be still in flux. However, as Britt Holbrook explains in the first contribution to this special issue, we can observe a convergence in the...

this article generates the first persian academic word list (pawl) which comprises the most frequently used academic vocabulary in persian academic texts. the pawl was compiled from a corpus of 927,008 running words from academic resources. two principles of range and frequency of word families guided the selection and arrangement of the word list. the corpus included seven books and one hundre...

Differential item functioning (DIF) is when a test item favors or hinders a characteristic exhibited by group members of a test-taking population. DIF analyses are statistical procedures used to determine to what extent the content of an item affects the item endorsement of sub-groups of test-takers. If DIF is found for many items on the test, the final test scores do not represent the same mea...