Scale development

Historically, psychologists have been interested in categorizing and measurement of coping styles. Moreover, development of culture-specific measures has been neglected in the coping literature. The present study is intended to develop and validate a parsimonious and broad measure of coping style in Iran. An item pool of 80 items was administered on a random sample of 911 university students in ten groups. A principled components analysis was performed on a subsample and a confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the remaining subsample. Twelve concurrent measures were used to ensure concurrent validity. A principled components analysis suggested a nine-factor solution. A confirmatory factor analysis on a distinct subsample confirmed the nine-factor structure. Subscales were labeled as turning to religion, procrastination, positivity, self-blame, avoidance, seeking social support, problem solving, wishful thinking, and passivity. All subscales were significantly correlated with theoretically related constructs. Alpha coefficients of the subscales ranged from 0.77 (problem solving) to 0.92 (turning to religion). The present study developed and validated the 45-item Iranian Coping Style Scale (ICSS) with nine subscales. Therefore, ICSS may be used as a reliable and valid measure of coping styles in research and clinical settings.

Teachers usually teach according to how brains naturally learn. In this way, not only do their learners learn, retain, and recall quickly, but also the teaching becomes more joyful. Increased attention to the worthwhile role of the mind in learning/teaching in recent times Due to the lack of a valid scale for estimating teachers' awareness of brain-friendly teaching, the current study intended to construct and validate a 54-item brain-friendly teaching inventory by the implementation of the Rasch model. The test was administered to 200 Iranian EFL teachers from different educational contexts. The results revealed that all the 54 items of the scale had a good fit to the Rasch model. Infit and outfit values were within the acceptable range which indicates unidimensionality of the scale. Furthermore, it is asserted that the inventory enjoyed suitable reliability. This demonstrates that the Brain-Friendly Teaching Inventory is valid and can be applied as a scale for assessing the teachers' awareness of brain-friendly teaching.