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Showing 14 results for Amirian
Volume 0, Issue 0 (Articles accepted at the time of publication 2024)
Abstract
Teachers’ Continuous Professional Development (T-CPD) is of utmost importance for language teachers. T-CPD is the stimulation for updating teachers’ subject knowledge and their teaching skills. Therefore, the predictive power of Psychological Well-being, L2 Teacher Grit, Grit-s, and Perceived Organizational Support (POS) on T-CPD was investigated through the mediating role of Work Motivation. Those who have participated in this study were 189 L2 teachers, who were from Khorasan Razavi Province, Iran. They took part in an online questionnaire. The collected data was analyzed using Path Analysis. Before running path analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was run to estimate Cronbach’s Alpha. Based on the CFA, two items (one from L2 Teacher Grit and one from POS) that did not have good loadings were removed from the scales. Then, the authers used path analysis to check the causal relationship among the variables in the proposed model. The fitness indices showed good fitness. Moreover, the more domain-specific L2 Teacher Grit performed better than the Gris-s scale. These insights can inform strategies for enhancing T-CPD and improving the overall quality of education. In addition, the results put light on the design of teacher training programs and organizational policies that aim to improve teacher quality and student outcomes.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (Articles accepted at the time of publication 2024)
Abstract
Despite extensive research on factors influencing Critical Pedagogy (CP) from a positive psychology perspective, the interplay between Emotion Regulation (ER), Psychological Well-Being (PWB), and Cultural Identity (CI) remains underexplored among Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. This study investigates the mediating role of CI in a novel model linking ER to PWB, with CP as the dependent variable. It addresses how these variables contribute to advocating for social justice in Eastern educational contexts. Using the quantitative design and Path Analysis (PA), 243 Iranian EFL teachers completed four electronic questionnaires: the CP scale (Roohani & Haghparast, 2020), the CI scale (Taheri, 2013), the PWB scale (Dagenais-Desmarais & Savoi, 2012), and the ER Sscale (Gross & John, 2003). Data analysis via AMOS 26 software revealed strong fit indices indicating robust model fit. Findings indicated that CI partially mediated the relationship between PWB and CP. Both direct (ER to CP) and indirect (PWB to CI to CP) effects were significant, contributing to a significant total effect of ER on CP. It is implied that integrating CI into teacher development programs can promote CP globally by enhancing educators' emotional resilience and commitment to social justice initiatives. This approach supports policymakers seeking inclusive learning environments that advocate for equity in diverse settings.
Volume 0, Issue 0 (Articles accepted at the time of publication 2024)
Abstract
With the increasing prevalence of online education, the significance of students’ self-regulation skills has never been more pronounced. Yet, many students struggle to develop and apply these skills (Bylieva et al., 2021). This transcendental phenomenological study investigates the self-regulation strategies employed by highly self-regulated university students in fully online learning environments. Participants were recruited online based on purposive and criterion sampling procedures. Data were collected through guided journals and semi-structured in-depth interviews, transcribed with Voxtab, and analyzed using Peoples' (2020) phenomenological framework and NVivo 10 software. The result revealed four major themes: meta-affective and affective practices, metacognitive and cognitive practices, socio-affective features, and tech-enhanced learning strategies. The study's trustworthiness was ensured through member checks, purposeful sampling, inter-rater agreement, and debriefing. The findings offer profound insights into students' experiences with online self-regulation. They present students with practical and effective online self-regulation strategies and provide educators with insights into course designs fostering self-regulation.
Volume 10, Issue 6 (Vol. 10, No. 6 (Tome 54), (Articles in Persian) 2019)
Abstract
Currently reflective teaching has received much attention by educators in the field of education and is believed to be a serious new measure of the quality of teaching. Many experimental studies have been carried out to study teachers’ reflective teaching using methods and research instruments such as reflective journals, video recordings or actions research but little research has been conducted using reflective journals in L2 teaching in the context of Iran. The present study intends to explore the extent to which EFL teachers engage in reflective teaching. For the survey section, there was a random sampling of 250 Iranian EFL teachers holding M.A, B.A. Ph.D. degree in linguistics, translation, English literature. Out of 250 surveyed participants, a convenience sampling comprising of 60 EFL teachers, both males and females, from two language institutes in Sabzevar, Iran, participated in the study. They were randomly assigned into two groups of A as the experimental group and B as the control group with 30 participants each. Data were collected by the following means: (a) Akbari et al.’s (2010) reflective teaching inventory administered to 250 Iranian EFL teachers, (b) journals written by 60 EFL teachers. The results revealed that EFL teachers practice the metacognitive as the most frequently used component and the practical component as the least frequently used one. Using Farrell’s (2004) framework, journal data were analyzed whose results indicated that EFL teachers practiced three chronological types of reflection namely, reflection-for-,in, and on-action with different degrees. The analysis of the contents of reflective teaching resulted in a framework with metacognitive, learner-based, cognitive, critical components. Some implications and suggestions for teacher education programs are discussed in EFL context.
Volume 11, Issue 4 (Fall 2023)
Abstract
Aim: The purpose of this research is to formulate a program and design a suitable model for environmental monitoring of water quality in order to reduce the costs of water quality monitoring and evaluation in No.1 Zabol Chahnimeh.
Material & Methods: In this study eight sampling stations were selected in the bed of the reservoir No.1 in order to monitoring and measuring physical, chemical and microbial parameters. Sampling was conducted systematically on a month basis for one year. Then the data were analyzed with the help of multivariate statistical methods such as cluster analysis, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and factor analysis.
Findings: Using multivariate statistical methods, No. 4, 5, 6 stations were selected as the main stations for sampling and factors of temperature, turbidity, DO, COD, magnesium, sodium, calcium, phosphate, chlorine, nitrite, sodium Absorption Ratio and pH was determined as the main water quality indicators. It was revealed that temperature, DO, nitrate and turbidity parameters should be sampled monthly, but the other parameters could be sampled periodically or even quarterly to model an optimal monitoring of water quality in reservoir No.1 during a year.
Conclusion: In general, the evaluation of the quality status of this valuable water resource by reducing the number of sampling stations, eliminating some unnecessary parameters and reducing the frequency of sampling completely and without defects and at a much lower cost is done for this reason, having the lowest costs and proper timing, management of the main reservoir will be possible considering all effective parameters.
Volume 12, Issue 3 (summer 2021)
Abstract
Rye is one of Iran's most important crops, known as Secale, belonging to the Poaceae. In this research, genetic diversity of 39 families of rye populations from different regions of Iran, the USA, and the Soviet :union: was evaluated with the ISSR marker. The results showed that 8 ISSR initiators produced 48 bands which included 18 polymorphic bands (37.5% polymorphism). The mean of polymorphic information content (PIC) and marker index value (MI) for ISSR primers was 0.15 and 7.2 respectively. The highest PIC (3.0) was related to primer 5+6 and the highest MI (0.96) reached for primer 1+6. After observing polymerase chain reaction products on an agarose gel and scoring DNA bands, the analysis was performed with NTSYS software. The cluster analysis dendrogram of UPGMA and Jaccard's similarity coefficient divided the rye populations into 9 groups, the results were compiled with grouping by principal component analysis. The results of analysis of Molecular Variance indicated an in-species variation more than inter-species variation. The mean Nei genetic variation (h) was 350 and the mean of Shannon index (I) in rye species was 523, which indicates a relatively good variety within species. The results showed that the ISSR marker was a useful tool in determining genetic variation of inter and intra specific of rye.
Volume 12, Issue 6 (January & February 2022 2021)
Abstract
Text mining’ refers to the computational process of unstructured text analytics for extracting latent linguistic layers and themes. It is especially significant as content or thematic analysis in descriptive and interpretive studies. This process begins with structuring simple texts and proceeds with summarizing, classifiing, modelling, evaluating and interpreting the inherent textual concepts and patterns. Given that this method counts as an interdisciplinary innovation especially in discoursal studies, it is to be pursued more intensively in academic studies. Despite the multitude of English studies in this area, there has been little interest to date in text mining amongst Iranian researchers as evidenced by the critically limited number of local Persian and English studies. Thus looking into the theory and practice of text mining and its major analytic tools and methods in Persian and English, this paper aims to prepare the ground for utilizing this methodology in language studies.
The last two decades faced a major increase in the rate and accuracy of knowledge generation in language studies due to advances in interdisciplinary studies of applied linguistics and computer sciences. At the heart of methodological innovations especially in discourse studies lies ‘text mining’ whose merits have only recently been appreciated by researchers. ‘Text mining’, ‘text data mining’ or ‘Text Analysis’ is the use of different data mining algorithms and methods like natural language processing and linguistic as well as statistical techniques to derive linguistic features, significant patterns and valuable themes from the unstructured texts through collecting unstructured data, pre-processing and cleansing them to detect and remove anomalies and processing and controlling operations (Zhou et al, 2012). These processes are further broken down into feature extraction, structural analysis, text summary, text classification, text clustering, and association analysis. Text mining is actually a complicated procedure of extracting valuable, significant patterns and trends from a large number of textual data used for such functions as product suggestion analysis, social media opinion mining, and sentiment or trend analysis (He, 2013).
Dating back to Feldman and Dagan (1995), text mining is an innovative methodology with a relatively short history which is often integrated with corpus analysis to computationally analyze a large body of unstructured texts as potential inormatieofinsight. As a subfield of data mining in computer sciences and an interdisciplinary method, text mining borrows from corpus and computational linguistics, whose main purpose is to extract the meta-characters representing textual features (Pons-Porrata et al, 2007). Zhou et al (2017) believe that despite its short history, text mining has been remarkably evolved into the mainstream research methodology in many interdisciplinary areas in the wake of increasingly rapid developments in data mining.
Dating back to Feldman and Dagan (1995), text mining is an innovative methodology with a relatively short history which is often integrated with corpus analysis to computationally analyze a large body of unstructured texts as potential inormatieofinsight. As a subfield of data mining in computer sciences and an interdisciplinary method, text mining borrows from corpus and computational linguistics, whose main purpose is to extract the meta-characters representing textual features (Pons-Porrata et al, 2007). Zhou et al (2017) believe that despite its short history, text mining has been remarkably evolved into the mainstream research methodology in many interdisciplinary areas in the wake of increasingly rapid developments in data mining.
Hashimi et al (2015) explained the steps involved in text mining as a semi-automated process of collecting, structuring and then analyzing textual data as follows: (a) collecting unstructured data from a variety of sources like textual documents, social media, web pages, mails, blogs, etc. using specialized corpora for organization, (b) pre-processing and cleansing the data for removing the anomalies to unveil latent valuable information using text mining tools, (c) unstructured data conversion into relevant structured formats, (d) discovering the underlying data patterns using word structures, sequences and frequency, and (e) extracting useful knowledge and storing them in a secure database for evaluation, later retrieval, trend analysis and possible decision-making. Text mining aslso makes use of lexicometrics dealing with frequency and co-occurrence analysis of vocabulary to derive structures from texts; sentiment analysis is an application of lexicometrics looking for positive or negative emotions in documents and has been used in social media analysis for evaluating public opinion (Shangzhen & Lemen, 2016).
Text mining is an area of inquiry that in itself deserves to be pursued more intensively in future studies and this paper, thus, is an attempt to review its basic principles, procedures and top analytic tools and to raise researchers’ awareness of the virtues of text mining.
Text mining is an area of inquiry that in itself deserves to be pursued more intensively in future studies and this paper, thus, is an attempt to review its basic principles, procedures and top analytic tools and to raise researchers’ awareness of the virtues of text mining.
Volume 13, Issue 4 (September & October 2022)
Abstract
The aim of the present study is to examine the views of language learners receiving English language teaching services about the quality of educational services and institutions’ facility. One of the models that is used to assess the quality of education is EduQual model, which was used to design a questionnaire consisting of 28 items. The participants of this study were 254 language learners of a private English language institution, and after receiving the questionnaires, 200 questionnaires were approved and analyzed. In quantitative phase of the study, a quantitative review of the questionnaire, as well as, the fitness of this model was investigated through factor analysis in AMOS. The results of the quantitative part of this study by two indicators confirmed the fitness of the model (RMSEA and CFI), however, the other two indicators of the fitness indices were not at the desired level (p-value for Chi square and CMIN / DF). The factor load for all items of this questionnaire was also evaluated acceptable and the correlation coefficients between the aspects were in the appropriate range. In interviews, this model was mostly accepted, but some aspects of this questionnaire were questioned. The interviewees also added other factors to the quality of English language institutions that were discussed in this study. Due to the large scope of institutions, the need to create a special model for quality assessment in English language institutions in this study was strongly suggested.
- Introduction
Research Questions
The main question of the present study is to investigate if it is feasible to hire EduQUAL model on Iranian Institutional context to evaluate the quality of educational services?
- Literature Review
- Methodology
- Results
- Discussion
Volume 15, Issue 12 (2-2016)
Abstract
This research investigates notch effect on fatigue life of HSLA100 steel which is widely applicable in the marine industry. Experimental tensile tests and rotating bending fatigue tests were performed on both smooth and notched cylindrical specimens and the corresponding mechanical properties and S-N curves were obtained. To better investigate the notch and also size effect on fatigue life of the specimens, two different notch geometries and specimen dimensions were used. To calculate the fatigue strength factor, stress distribution under bending load is simulated for smooth and notched specimens. Then, the stress distribution under bending load is converted to stress distribution under rotating bending load using an in-house developed code. Finally, using an in-house developed code, the fatigue strength factor of the specimens is calculated by weakest link theory. In order to better investigate the weakest-link theory, in calculating the fatigue strength factor, this factor is calculated from the classical methods and compared with experimental results. Finally, Comparison of theoretical with experimental results shows that the weakest-link theory gives better predictions than other classical methods and the results are closer to experimental ones. Also, Weakest-link theory uses the finite element results to predict notch effect. This facilitates the use of this theory in fatigue design of complicated specimens.
Volume 15, Issue 12 (2-2016)
Abstract
The main problems in machining of thin-walled parts made of high-strength aluminum alloys are distortion and dimensional instability, which lead to an increase in distorted part scraps and production costs. This article attempts to investigate the correlation between machining-induced and quench-induced residual stresses and the distortion of thin-walled parts made of AL7075 alloy. The experiments are carried out in two steps. In the first step, the effects of polymer and uphill quenching methods in comparison with water quenching in the reduction of residual stresses are investigated on an experimental basis. By conducting the machining tests, the effect of residual stress on distortion is investigated. In the second step, several experiments are carried out under different machining conditions. To study the effect of mechanical and thermal loads on the residual stresses and distortion, the machining force and temperature of cutting area are measured. Finally, the correlation between the machining-induced residual stress and distortion is studied by measurement of stress on some parts. The results indicate that both machining and quench-induced residual stresses are effective in distortion of thin walled parts.
Volume 17, Issue 1 (Spring 2017 2017)
Abstract
This research examines the effect of monetary policies on unemployment under inflation uncertainty in Iran using the annual data during 1974-2011. The basic model is selected according to the simultaneous equilibrium of dynamic aggregate demand and supply. In addition, inflation uncertainty is calculated using the GARCH family models including ARCH, GARCH and EGARCH. The generated data from a novel model is considered as a proxy for inflation uncertainty, and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) is used to estimate this model. The estimation results show that inflation uncertainty reduces the unemployment rate, i.e. the effect of monetary policies on unemployment is decreased under inflation uncertainty, and there is a significant and positive relationship between unemployment and inflation rates. Henceforth, an increase in inflation uncertainty leads to an increase in unemployment rate, which is in line with Friedman's theory in this field
Volume 17, Issue 4 (6-2017)
Abstract
In the present work, the thermal effects of a CW laser on skin tissues with blood perfusion are simulated. For this purpose, a one-dimensional medium is considered that is exposed to the laser beams from one side and the other side is at the constant temperature (37℃) because of being touched by other parts of the body. The laser beams are considered to be collimated and perpendicular to the surface of the tissue. The skin tissue is a strong anisotropic scattering medium and is assumed to be gray with black walls. Also, the blood perfusion is considered in the bioheat transfer equation of the skin tissue. The governing equations of this problem are radiative heat transfer coupled with conductive heat transfer that the discrete ordinates method, finite volume method and scaling method is used to solve the radiative transfer equation, the energy equation and to model the anisotropic scattering of the tissue, respectively. Validation of the model is performed by comparison with the other related works. Then, the effects of different optical and physical parameters of tissue such as conduction-radiation parameter, scattering albedo, extinction coefficient, blood perfusion and the effects of laser power on the time of temperature increase of the tissue and thermal penetration depth are studied. It should be mentioned that the results of the present study show valuable guidance for understanding the coupled light and bioheat transport in tissues in therapy, surgery and diagnostic tasks.
Volume 26, Issue 2 (1-2020)
Abstract
Through an applied text study we try to get closer to “Rehlat Ebn Fatoma” distinguished by structure and composition, by Nagiub Mahfouz Egyptian novelist, and perhaps the most important characteristics is its mastery to contain a recall of the heritage of mystical and spiritual literature, that Makes this navel tends its own shoved to meet the novelist thecnical inspiration in the search for truth and spiritual perfection through a mystical experience of love. Mahfouz's ambition to enrich his narrative experience by expanding the meaning of love in Iranian Sufism stories, like the story of “Al- Shaikh Sanaan va Al-Fatat Al- Rumiah”by Attar Al- Nayshabouri, contributed to the formulation of the mystical structure of the novel in terms of idea and aesthetically and represent a creative image raises the question: How did Nagiub Mahfouz recall the Sufiam dominant thought of the text of Al-Shaikh Sanaan in Rehlat Ebn Fatoma? The applied- analytical approach is desiring to stand on the Suism discours manifestations of the story of Al-Shaikh Sanaan in Mahfouz’z novel and try to reveal the suggestive semantics like the role of women in achiving the mystic style and the dimensions of dream or imagination and travel from the countries trip to the travel of hearts and examination in thought and in the production of Sufi meaning.
Davoud Padiz, Saeed Ketabi, Zahra Amirian,
Volume 26, Issue 4 (12-2019)
Volume 26, Issue 4 (12-2019)
Abstract
As a new shift in the ELT field, critical pedagogy (CP) originated from Freirean philosophy. It aims at raising both teachers and learners’ awareness towards the instrumental view of ELT and its superficial neutrality. Despite the recent growth of CP in Iran, it is unknown whether or not CP is supported and practiced in the teacher development process of Iranian universities. Moreover, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, an appropriate questionnaire dealing with such a concept has not been developed yet. The present study, therefore, aimed at developing and validating a CP-oriented scale to be used in ELT education system in Iran. To validate this instrument, 150 EFL teachers and students from three universities of Iran were selected through convenience sampling. The researchers employed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The results indicated an acceptable level of internal consistency and satisfactory construct validity. This measure can be helpful for those who support practicalizing CP tenets in the field of ELT, in general and in teacher development process, in particular.
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