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 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 thesis attempts to investigate the effects of prelistening activities on enhancing iranian efl learners` listening comprehension. the present study investigated ways in which learners` background knowledge could be activated in order to enhance their l2 listening comprehension by limiting the number of possible text interpretations prior to listening. the experiments conducted in this stud...

heuristics are often used to provide solutions for flow shop scheduling problems.the performance of a heuristic is usually judged by comparing solutions and run times on test cases.this investigation proposes an analytical alternative ,called asymptotic convergence ,which tests the convergence of the heuristic to a lower bound as problem size grows. the test is a stronger variation of worst cas...

current studies in second language (l2) learning have revealed the positive role of corrective feedback (cf) in both oral and written forms in different language features. the present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of both direct and indirect written corrective feedback (wcf) on the use of grammatical collocations in l2 writing. the study also sought to examine whether the effec...

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 investigated the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of tasks along +/- few elements and the time limits on l2 learners writing performance. to conduct the study, 60 iranian efl learners with two levels of proficiency, low and high intermediate, were selected and assigned to three groups based on the time devoted to task completion. the participants performed both a simp...

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...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of subtitling on vocabulary learning among iranian intermediate students. to find the homogeneity of the groups, tofel test was administered to student in kish mehr institute in garmsar. after analyzing the data, 60 participants (female students) who scored within the range of one standard deviation above and below the mean, were selected as h...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...