This study was an attempt to explore the reading strategy use of Iranian M.A. students across three different fields of study. Eighty-two M.A. students of power engineering, physics, and communicationwere selected by a Nelson test and the reading comprehension section of a TOEFL. The reading comprehension section of the TOEFL served also as a specific task which helped participants report their...

We pursue two strategies for offline data collection for a temporal question answering system that uses both quantitative methods and fuzzy methods to reason about time and events. The first strategy extracts event descriptions from the structured year entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, yielding clean quantitative temporal information about a range of events. The second strategy mine...

Making sense of concept maps is an ongoing challenge for the concept mapping community. This paper introduces a multilevel analysis strategy by combining quantitative and qualitative methods to triangulate changes in students’ concept maps. Quantitative analysis includes overall, selected, and weighted propositional analysis using a knowledge integration rubric (Linn, 2000) as well as network a...

As an important method to solve sequential decisionmaking problems, reinforcement learning learns the policy of tasks through the interaction with environment. But it has difficulties scaling to largescale problems. One of the reasons is the exploration and exploitation dilemma which may lead to inefficient learning. We present an approach that addresses this shortcoming by introducing qualitat...

changes in credit risk may arise when either the value or the risk of corporate assets changes. changes in the equity value associated with the changes in the asset value and changes in asset risk can be characterized into potentially countervailing direct and indirect effects. the indirect effect of risk on equity value is a function of factors that affect the debt value of including leverage,...

This two-component study (descriptive cross-sectional and qualitative) assessed the availability of contraceptives in primary care clinics in Brazilian municipalities. The family planning program was also analyzed as part of the country's Family Health Strategy. Phone interviews were held with local health managers to obtain information on contraceptive supply in a selected sample of municipali...

By increasing the health promotion actions in the Family Health Strategy it is possible to contribute to implement comprehensive care. Nevertheless, technologies gap still hinder the process of training the professionals to analyze the health potentials of the population. The objective of this study is to synthesize the contributions of the WHOQOL-bref in training professionals regarding the he...