educational background

The present study aimed to examine the effective factors in the rank of national entrance exam of the candidates in state universities and higher education institutes in Iran in the form of a multilevel analysis. Therefore, the data of 5000 candidates was gathered randomly from five experimental groups in the national examination of 2017. The HLM7.30 software was used for multilevel data analysis. The results revealed that among the provinces there is a significant difference in the average national rank of the candidates in Math, Humanity, Art, and English experimental groups. However, there was not any significant difference in the Science group. In the Math group, the average scores of the third year of high school, the total average of diploma, the entrance quota, and gender determined 58.44 percent of the whole variance of the national rank at level one. In the Humanity group the average scores of the third year of high school, the total average of diploma, and gender 49.22 percent. In the Art group the total average of the third year of high school, the entrance quota and gender 15.8 percent; and finally in the English group the average scores of the third year of high school, the total average of diploma, the entrance quota, and gender were wholly 31.45 percent.

Formative assessment is deemed the collaborative processes in which teachers and learners are engaged for the purpose of understanding the learners' learning and diagnosing their strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, teachers' beliefs about formative assessment are paramount and might be influenced by a legion of variables such age, educational background, instructional experience, and gender. This study investigated the impacts of EFL teachers' age, educational background, instructional experience, and gender on their beliefs about formative assessment. To this aim, 100 male and 100 female EFL teachers from Ahvaz junior and senior high schools participated in the study. The participants were given the questionnaire of teachers' beliefs about formative assessment. The results regarding EFL teachers' age, educational background, and gender revealed no statistically significant influence on their beliefs about formative assessment. However, teachers' teaching experience had significant impacts on their beliefs about formative assessment. These findings can contribute to EFL authorities concerning assessment procedures in language learning and teaching.

The current study attempted qualitatively to explore and compare the qualities that native and Iranian English teachers (with and without related educational backgrounds) attend to while rating their students' oral productions in the classroom context. In doing so, the perceptions of 19 native English teachers (9 graduates in TEFL and 10 graduates in other majors) along with 18 Iranian English teachers (10 graduates in TEFL and 8 graduates in other majors) were sought through semi-structured interviews. The data were collected after the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) disease in 2020, which gave the researchers no choice but to look for haphazard cases with specific features in social networks. The recorded interviews were analyzed attentively through content analysis. The findings indicated that although all native and non-native respondents focused intensively on the structural features of language in general while rating oral interviews, they had notably different views regarding some sub-features within each category. Further results showed that the native and non-native TEFL-graduate teachers, unlike their peers with unrelated educational backgrounds, also gave credits to several message-based and pragmatic aspects of oral production. The findings have practical implications for researchers, pre-service and in-service teachers, and teacher educators.