Effective pedagogical practice promotes the achievement of students and builds up confidence of the teachers in teaching. The major cause for the gap in pedagogical practices can be attributed to the lack of pedagogical competence. The present study employed a mixed method research approach to examine Iranian high school English Language teachers’ perception of pedagogical competence in two pha...

BACKGROUND In order to begin to address the burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in sub-Saharan Africa, high quality community-based epidemiological studies from the region are urgently needed. Cluster-designed sampling methods may be most efficient, but designing such studies requires assumptions about the clustering of the outcomes of interest. Currently, few studies from Sub-Saharan Af...

SUMMARY The polya posterior gives a noninformative Bayesian justification for various single-stage sampling procedures. Here this type of reasoning is extended to two-stage cluster sampling problems. The frequency properties of the resulting procedures are studied.

This article describes two probability sampling approaches to sampling water resources. In the rst approach, a complete enumeration of eligible sample units (e.g. stream segments, water bodies, drainage basins) is performed using GIS or paper maps to create a list frame. A probability random sample is then selected from this frame. In the second approach, a two-stage sample is selected. In the ...

The precision of parameters estimation are determined by the sample size and the sampling design used in a study. Due to such practical constraints as the budget and manpower, most large-scale educational studies would not adopt the simple random sampling design. TIMSS 2007 used a two-stage stratified cluster sampling design. In the first stage, about 150 schools were selected according to some...

To evaluate the performance of the empirical predictors presented in San Martino et al. (2005), we compute the cases where they are the best, “equivalent” to the best (tables 1) or poor (table2). We consider only the case of equal unknown within cluster variances. First, we consider the cases in which each of the proposed predictors has the best performance, i.e. we compute the percentage of ca...