data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

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...

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

abstract poor reading comprehension can result in failure in using references, benefiting from professional gatherings and resources, keeping up with the growing body of knowledge in the virtual world of the internet, and failing to achieve in efl programs. the purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to explore the effects of background knowledge and previewing narrative and expos...

in this study reference as one of the five cohesive devices in the achievement of textuality in english and persian narrative/descripitive written texts is focused on and analysed . to do so , the theoretical framework elaborated by halliday and hasan (1976) and its version adapted by the writer to match the sub-types of reference in farsi are applied to the analysis of reference in english and...

the purpose of this study was to investigate iranian efl learners’ beliefs about the role of rote learning (rl) in vocabulary learning strategies; besides, the study examined if english proficiency would influence learners’ vocabulary learning strategy use. this study addresses the need for a clear understanding of the role of rl in efl vocabulary learning by looking at iranian efl learners’ ow...

the following null hypothesis was proposed: there is no significant difference between the efl students listening comprehension development receiving pictorial cues and those receiving no cuse. to test the null hypothesis, 52 male and femal freshmen students of medicine studing at iran university of medical scinces were randomly selected from a total population of 72 students. to ensure that th...

abstract this study is an attempt to determine the effect of nano- technology education on science lesson for fifth grade in primary school in the city of kermanshah. this research is experimental and is conducted in the from of pre-test and post- test for the control group. an achievement test was administered to determine the rate of learning in the students. the research is an applied one. ...

abstract the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of critical thinking on writing ability of 60 iranian intermediate efl learners studying at chenar language institute in khuzestan, iran. to this end, the participants of the study were selected based on their performance in an pet test, a cornell critical thinking test form x and a pre-test of writing. the participants un...