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...

abstract: postmethod is a newly developed pedagogy which as an alternative to method rejects the notion of good or bad methods and the concept of best method that can be generalized and appropriate for all contexts. instead, it treats each context as unique and one of a kind which cant be compared with other cases. this study is a postmethod-oriented one which investigates whether and how far t...

muhammad ibn muhammad ibn numan, known as "shaykh mufid," one of the great imamiye theologians and jurists in the fourth and early fifth century , had comprehensive mastery of both rational and traditional topics and exerted his influence upon both his contemporary and future scholors. he is considered to be one of the top imamiye scholars who spent his lifetime teaching, learning and authorin...

uncertainty in the financial market will be driven by underlying brownian motions, while the assets are assumed to be general stochastic processes adapted to the filtration of the brownian motions. the goal of this study is to calculate the accumulated wealth in order to optimize the expected terminal value using a suitable utility function. this thesis introduced the lim-wong’s benchmark fun...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...

this research is a study on indicators of listening instruction in iranian english as a foreign language (efl) curriculum at guidance school and high school educational levels. this thesis aims at determining: a) the indicators of listening instruction at guidance school and high school efl curriculum. b) the indicators of listening instruction in irans guidance school and high school efl curri...

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...

nitric oxide (no) is a small molecule synthesized by most of mammalian cells with diverse biological activities including vasodilatation, host defense and wound healing. impaired wound healing is a common occurrence among diabetics and patients receiving glucocorticoid therapy. on the other hand the application of laser in biomedical area have been increased. thus, the current studies were desi...

acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance he...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...