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 following question poped up: is there any relationship between iranian high school efl learners reading comprehension and listening comprehension? then the following null hypothesis (ho) was developed to the test the above, mentioned question. "there is no relationship between high school efl learners reading comprehension and listening comprehension. for nearly 16 weeks, the experimental g...

employees always concern about losing their job , or in other word , losing their income resources. for this purpose, every government requires strong system for covering these concerns. the unemployment insurance (ui) program’s can be used for achieving this goal. in this thesis, we price ui based on the insurance history of employee and the duration of being unemployed. we use the weibull dis...

this thesis is a study on insurance fraud in iran automobile insurance industry and explores the usage of expert linkage between un-supervised clustering and analytical hierarchy process(ahp), and renders the findings from applying these algorithms for automobile insurance claim fraud detection. the expert linkage determination objective function plan provides us with a way to determine whi...

just as motivation is important in sla research, demotivation constitutes an important factor, too. there are many studies done on demotivation and burnout of teachers. many of these studies have been conducted on one or two aspects of english instruction. consequently, there are few studies which have been done on more than two aspects of english teaching. the aim of this study is to find out ...

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of teaching meta cognitive strategies on iranian intermediate efl students speaking proficiency. in this study the researcher has employed metacognitive strategies taken from brown (2000) to teach speaking strategies to number of participants. the participants were intermediate students of shokouh language institute; they were divided into an ...

august wilson is undoubtedly one of the rare black playwrights whose works have attracted streams of attention and worldwide audience. the present study aims at analyzing fences and piano lesson which are two of the most successful plays in his pittsburgh cycle from the perspective of michel foucault’s theories and ideas. studying these two plays from foucault’s perspective opens new windows in...

according to webster and wind (1972) and anderson et al (1987), “organizational buying is a complex process and involves many people from different functional areas, multiple goals and potentially conflicting decision criteria. moreover, the customers of today are also more knowledgeable and selective when making their purchasing decisions. since a key to organizational survival is the retentio...

the concepts of similarity and dissimilarity have been the interest of many researchers. basically, in the studies the similarity between two objects or phenomena, has been discussed. in this thesis, we consider the case when the resemblance or similarity among three objects or phenomena of a set, 3-similarity in our terminology, is desired. later we will extend our definitions and propos...