درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study attempted to discover whether there is a significant relationship between EFL teachers' critical thinking ability and their teaching success.To this end, 113 Iranian male and female English teachers were required to fill out Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. Besides, their students were asked to answer the Characteristics of Successful EFL Teachers questionnaire. The statistical analysis of the data showed that there was a significant correlation between EFL teachers’ critical thinking skill and their teaching success. Besides, findings revealed that there was a significant difference between male and female teachers regarding their critical thinking skills, and that BA teachers differed from AS teachers with regard to critical thinking skills. More specifically, male BA teachers took the most advantages from critical thinking skills than others.  

Some consider assessment in terms of a systematic way of gathering and evaluating information within educational system and particularly higher education. Since, the term ‘’assessment’’ refers and relates to administrative processes, this paper has shed light some consideration on how it can benefit the members of department and program. Program assessment ultimately emphasizes on direction for developing students learning quality and satisfaction of its central role in educational system. Thus, this study aimed to regard goals and purposes, specifically, explore new trends, techniques and procedures which play an important role in this aspect of assessment and also can have influences on outcomes of the academic units. To this end, some of the practical assessment methods were selected to be done on different fields of study in Shahrekord Azad University as well as discussing their description, strengths and weaknesses to expose whether assessments follow the rules and procedures of program assessment to reach the best consequences in assessment of academic units. 

Although the use of verbal protocols is growing in oral assessment, research on the use of raters’ verbal protocols is rather rare. Moreover, those few studies did not use a mixed-methods design. Therefore, this study investigated the possible impacts of rater training on novice and experienced raters’ application of a specified set of standards in rating. To meet this objective, the study made use of verbal protocols produced by 20 raters who scored 300 test takers’ oral performances and analyzed the data both qualitatively and quantitatively. The outcomes demonstrated that through applying the training program, the raters were able to concentrate more on linguistic, discourse, and phonological features; therefore, the extent of their agreement increased specifically among the inexperienced raters. The analysis of verbal protocols also revealed that training how to apply a well-defined rating scale can foster its use for raters both validly and reliably. Various groups of raters approach the task of rating in different ways, which cannot be explored through pure statistical analysis. Thus, think-aloud verbal protocols can shed light on the vague sides of the issue and add to the validity of oral language assessment. Moreover, since the results of this study showed that inexperienced raters can produce protocols of higher quality and quantity in the use of macro and micro strategies to evaluate test takers’ performances, there is no evidence based on which decision makers should exclude inexperienced raters solely because of their lack of adequate experience.

Providing climatic data like temperature in good spatial resolution is a key requirement for many geographical, ecological and bioclimatic research. With this in mind, various related studies use thermal remote sensing images as auxiliary data to enhance the air temperature interpolation outcomes. That’s while normally summer season images are used as auxiliary data and less attention has been paid to winter season acquired images which are often covered by snowy areas. With this in mind, the Snow Covered Area (SCA) extent impacts on air temperature interpolation were investigated. The data used were temperature data and four Landsat thermal images of December 1986 and 1999. To calculate the area of snow cover, band combination and NDSI index were used. Results show that Thermal Co-Kriging (TCK) of December 1986 provide better results with more snow affected thermal image. While in 1999 although different results were obtained but the best selected output did not show impacts of different snow cover area. These results revealed that probably the SCA extent threshold could be different and could be found with more research. Finally, we know that number of our observation stations are too low and considering the Kriging requirements like normal distribution and stationarity are toilsome but we should consider that this problem exists in the regions with low density of gauges and should find a way to enhance the air temperature interpolation in these cases. At the end, using high resolution, Landsat thermal bands improve our ability to explain and visualize local temperature variability into a variety of applications such as deriving temperature dependent climatic variables, species distribution modelling and assessments of fire risk.