Criteria

The Islamic Republic of Iran, as an Islamic and independent country on the original ideology of Islam, announced freedom of political parties within the Constitution (Act, 26). After the Islamic Revolution victory in 1979, two main political fronts formed, "Principlism Front and Reformism Front." Reformism seems a challenging issue to the Iranian nation as it may appear adopted on the Western ideology. The present study aimed to remove any ambiguity on this issue to help politicians, scholars, and ordinary people. To this aim, the following question should answer: what are Ayatollah Khamenei's criteria for Reformism in Iran? Moreover, the research hypothesis was that Ayatollah Khamenei approves of Reformism in Iran based on some defined criteria. For the analysis, the political thoughts of Ayatollah Khamenei were recorded as written texts which contained the word Reformism and selected and obtained from the following official Website. The collected documents analyzed through Discourse Analysis to elicit and specify the criteria for Reformism in Iran. The results indicated that: Reformism is essential and required, and has to implement in the country; Reformism should be value directed and comply with principles of Islam and the Revolution; the exact definition of Reformism is needed to specify the goals; the Reformism should be organized and controlled from a powerful and aware center according to Constitution foundation; comprehensiveness and concordance, reforms have to implement in all areas in the society synchronically; a tolerable and influential center should control the Reformism to avoid immethodically, and the structure of the Constitution has to protect in Reformism issues.

Some universities in Iran have recently witnessed a shift in admission criteria from university admission test performance towards high school records. This sudden change seems to be unwarranted since the predictive power of high school records has not been explored. To fill in this gap, this study aims at showcasing the predictive validity of high school records for undergraduate students of English language and literature. To this end, a random sample of undergraduate students studying at Shahrood University of Technology were selected as the participants, the predictor variables were operationally defined as the participants’ grade point average (GPA) in three school subjects including English, Persian and Arabic languages along with their overall high school GPA, and the explained variable was operationalized as the participants’ overall GPA for the first academic year. The results of Pearson correlation revealed a significant but very low correlation between the variables of interest. Moreover, the results of multiple regression analysis revealed that none of the predictor variables well predicts academic success in English language and literature. Although the results of this study are case-specific, they have clear implications for policy makers and interested researchers nationwide.

Following the changes in the paradigm of urban studies in recent years, sustainability has become an increasingly important issue in the neighborhood’s planning and designing. However, this concept has originally been developed for American and European neighborhoods’ planning, it could also be customized for other neighborhoods’. Additionally, in the neighborhood scale, the quality parameter factors are more sensible and understandable. Therefore, attention to use these parameters may have better results for neighborhood sustainability concept. This paper claims that if subjective indicators that customized with local context and derived from residents’ perception about sustainable neighborhood are being used, significant differences between residents’ valuing on subjective criteria of sustainability from one neighborhood to another would be found. For this claim, the paper has studied the two neighborhoods of Tehran, as a metropolis with different socio-economic and socio-cultural diversity in its neighborhoods. The findings show that the resulted criteria in the neighborhoods of Tehran, in comparison to each other, have meaningful differences.