It has been previously suggested in the literature that with aging, degenerative changes as well as disc herniation start at the lower lumbar segments, with higher disc involvement observed in an ascending fashion in older age groups. We conducted a study to investigate this correlation between age and level of disc herniation, and to associate it with the magnitude of the Lumbar Lordotic Angle...

this qualitative study analyzes the reasons of college students for learning english as a foreign language (efl) in costa rica and the reasons of high school students for learning german as a foreign language (gfl) in the us. it asks to what extent the learners’ reasons align with or deviate from neoliberal discourses that commodify foreign languages. the analysis of 27 interviews in a us high ...

BACKGROUND The attainment of technical competence for surgical procedures is fundamental to a proficiency-based surgical training program. We hypothesized that aptitude may directly affect one's ability to successfully complete the learning curve for minimally invasive procedures. The aim was to assess whether aptitude has an impact on ability to achieve proficiency in completing a simulated mi...

Linguistic alignment has emerged as an important property of conversational language and a driver of mutual understanding in dialogue. While various computational measures of linguistic alignment in corpus and experimental data have been devised, a systematic evaluation of them is missing. In this study, we first evaluate the sensitivity and distributional properties of three measures, indiscri...

In this article, I argue that the regression-based discrepancy method used in the diagnosis of learning disabilities is invalid because it is inconsistent with the underlying underachievement concept of which it is intended to be the operationalization. I mathematically demonstrate that the regression-based discrepancy method largely reflects achievement-specific determinants, thereby defeating...

The reliability and validity of 4 approaches to the assessment of children and adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) are reviewed, including models based on (a) aptitude-achievement discrepancies, (b) low achievement, (c) intra-individual differences, and (d) response to intervention (RTI). We identify serious psychometric problems that affect the reliability of models based on aptitude-a...

language learning strategies have been controversial ever since rubin’s (1975) landmark article more that 30 years ago. to this day, there is no consensus regarding exactly what a strategy is, which has impeded research initiatives and at times threatened the validity of research findings. the relationship between strategies and successful language learning has also been questioned. based on th...

the potential of computers to support learning and teaching m almost all subject areas is now widely accepted. at ail levels of education computers aid teachers to enrich their learning/teaching environment. in the field of language education, especially english as a second/foreign language (esl/efl) computer-assisted learning has acted as an indirect boost to enhance language proficiency. whil...