abstract: the potato tuberworm, phthorimaea operculella (zeller), is an important insect pest of potato (solanum tuberosum l.) in the storage and field in most parts of the world especially in tropical and subtropical regions due to its close relationship with the host, high reproductive potential and high economic losses. information on host preference, life table parameters and digestive en...

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...

abstract the aim of the present study is to explore the impact of the cognitive reading strategy instruction on learners reading self-efficacy and their reading achievement. in order to fulfill this purpose, from 120 participants, 90 intermediate efl learners as an experimental group were chosen from three different educational settings namely, yazd university, yazd science and art un...

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...

critical thinking ability has an important role in education. accordingly, scholars around the world are searching for new ways for teaching and improving students critical thinking ability. in line with the studies in efl contexts supporting the positive relationship between critical thinking and writing performances, this study investigated the differential effects of halverson’s critical thi...

this study was carried out to investigate the effects of integrative vs. instrumental motivation, learning strategy use and gender on iranian efl learners. to this end, 120 efl learners both male and female majoring in english language and literature at shiraz university participated in the study. in order to conduct this study three instruments were used: oxford quick placement test, motivatio...

this is an original study on the effect of a polyisobutylene – polydimethylsiloxane (pibpdms) block copolymer modifier used as an interfacial active agent on the dynamics behaviour of single newtonian drops suspended in a polyisobutylene (pib) newtonian matrix. the results were divided in two sections. the first part included the experiments carried out on the non-modified and 2% block cop...

this study attempted to explore if teaching english collocations through two different modes of awareness-raising and input flooding has any possible differential effect on immediate retention as well as retention in a delayed assessment. it also compared the possible differential effect of teaching english collocations implicitly and explicitly on actively using the items in writing. m...

abstract foreign and iranian cultures are far distinct in the constraints imposed on writing and translating for children, since the iranian literary system is mainly concerned with cultural and religious instructions which lead to manipulation of translated texts. this study sought to identify the cultural and social constraints and norms which determined the strategies applied in the transl...

plagiarism in esl/efl learning contexts has been established as a dynamic and multi-layered phenomenon and has become a topic engaging many researchers in a heated debate in recent years. comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely on source texts in their writings and copying is a major strategy used by both l1 and l2 writers. in our country a...