The study examined the impact of high school English teachers’ awareness of pedagogical competence on student learning. A psychometric measurement instrument of English language teachers' pedagogical competence (ELTPC) was first developed through factor analysis with 320 high school teachers in Guilan, Northern Iran. Based on the developed instrument, 36 teachers were divided into two groups of...

The purposes of this project are to establish the psychometric properties of instruments used to gather data relevant to blind rehabilitation outcomes, to refine the scaling and scoring protocols for the instruments, and to revise and refine the outcome instruments. This 3-year project will gather outcome and demographic data from an estimated 1,200 visually impaired veterans per year, along wi...

INTRODUCTION Harmful drinking among young people is common in Australia and many other countries. Social norms and their influence on adolescents' alcohol consumption behaviours have received much research attention in recent years. However, there is limited understanding of how social norms related to alcohol are developed and transmitted across social networks and a specific tool that measure...

PURPOSE Medical professionalism is a fundamental competency for all physicians and continuous development of professionalism during residency training is crucial. The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument assessing residents' attitudes toward unprofessional behaviors. METHODS A questionnaire survey was conducted in cooperation with the Korea Resident Association from May to July ...

The increasing need for improving survey research is driven by commercial pressures facing the market research industry. Particular challenges are non-response and response bias associated with survey instruments. We suggest how focus groups can assist in meeting this challenge. We explain how focus groups can assist in refining segmentation criteria, eliciting emotional purchasing motives and ...

In Virtual Reality (VR) it is possible to induce illusions in which users report and behave as if they have entered into altered situations and identities. The effect can be robust enough for participants to respond "realistically," meaning behaviors are altered as if subjects had been exposed to the scenarios in reality. The circumstances in which such VR illusions take place were first introd...

OBJECTIVES Currently there is a lack of information regarding the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of healthy as well as chronically ill children on a European level. In 2 European projects questionnaires for the assessment of the HRQoL in children and adolescents have been developed: The KIDSCREEN project aims at a co-operative European development of a standardised screening instrument ...

The SIM Lite Astrometric Observatory is a mission concept for a space-borne instrument to perform micro-arcsecond narrow-angle astrometry to search 60 to 100 nearby stars for Earth-like planets, and to perform global astrometry for a broad astrophysics program. The main enabling technology development for the mission was completed during phases A & B. While the project is waiting for the result...

There are many facets of managing security in information systems. Although there are prior studies that focus on how to build secure code from an architectural standpoint, an often overlooked aspect of security is the relationship between the systems development policies and procedures and the security of the systems developed. We focus on this relationship and draw from a general software qua...

This article describes the initial phases of development of the Couples Resource Map Scales (CRMS). These scales are designed to assess the degree of support couples receive from various personal, relationship, and contextual resources. The first phase involved the initial item development and an expert review of an extended list of potential items. The second phase involved a survey of univers...