Sharif Digital Repository

Purpose This paper develops a theoretical framework to guide future inquiry into board governance of independent schools. Design/methodology/approach The authors' approach is to integrate literatures related to corporate and educational boards, motivation, leadership and group processes that are appropriate for conceptualizing independent school board governance processes. Findings Shows that the institutional role of an independent school board is likely to be quite different, and considerably more significant than the role of a board of a systemic school. Originality/value This paper develops an original theoretical framework that will provide a sound basis for investigation of an... 

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between research in Iranian medical universities, together with their Web Impact Factor (WIF). Design/methodology/approach - The Altavista search engine was chosen because of its advanced search facilities for counting links and having a wider scope of academic web sites than other search engines. It was searched for determining the number of pages, in-links and self-links of 42 web sites of Iranian medical universities. The Web Impact Factor (WIF) was calculated by two formulas and the relationship between the two grades of universities (WIF and ISI) was calculated by using the Spearman's correlation coefficient. Findings -... 

Malaysian secondary schools are facing a shortage of male teachers. Almost 70% of the teaching profession is dominated by female teachers. There is an obvious gap in the reason why teaching is not preferred by the male gender. This study intends to find the determinants of career success among male teachers with the hope of revealing the career success factors that are associated with male teachers. A survey was done among 140 male teachers in secondary schools in the state of Malacca, Malaysia. Results showed that 4out of 5 of the determinants factors are significantly explaining career success among the teachers (Emotional Intelligence, Person-Job-Fit, Career Adaptability & Work-Life... 

There is no doubt that education is the key to development. An important step in evaluating the condition of education in a society is to estimate the rate of return to education in that society. This paper estimates the private rate of return to schooling for men born in 1951–1983 in Iran using a pseudo-panel fixed-effect model. This is the first study that measures unbiasedly the rate of return to schooling in Iran. We construct the pseudo-panel data using six repeated cross sections of Household Expenditures and Income Surveys between 2008 and 2013. Our estimates show that the overall rate of return is around 9% based on the pseudo-panel fixed-effect approach. The estimates reveal a... 

Individuals have been regarded as independent decision makers in majority of transportation analysis. However, agents’ behaviors are usually affected by the interactions among the members in a group; and therefore, individual decision-making paradigms may result in unrealistic outcomes and erroneous interpretations of the results. In light of this, the present study develops discrete choice models in individual and group levels and compares their prediction power in predicting the choice of escort pattern in dual-worker households with at least one under-18-year-old student. The main purpose is to reveal the efficiency of each approach in analyzing parent-child joint activities and highlight... 

There is no doubt that education is the key to development. An important step in evaluating the condition of education in a society is to estimate the rate of return to education in that society. This paper estimates the private rate of return to schooling for men born in 1951–1983 in Iran using a pseudo-panel fixed-effect model. This is the first study that measures unbiasedly the rate of return to schooling in Iran. We construct the pseudo-panel data using six repeated cross sections of Household Expenditures and Income Surveys between 2008 and 2013. Our estimates show that the overall rate of return is around 9% based on the pseudo-panel fixed-effect approach. The estimates reveal a... 

A growing number of parents accompany their children to and from school, to make sure they travel with the best care and minimum stress. Policies that aim at promoting nonmotorized modes of transportation or at least discouraging auto driving solely for the purpose of picking up or dropping off the kids may not be successful in practice unless primary concerns of parents are treated appropriately. School escorting decisions need to be investigated, as a decreasing trend in students' travel freedom also decreases the tendency toward the use of active modes of travel, complicates intrahousehold activities that need to be considered in travel demand models, and increases externalities (e.g.,... 

We test a copula-based joint discrete–continuous model to unravel mode choice and travel distance decisions in a joint framework for school trips. This framework explicitly accounts for common unobserved factors that may affect both the mode choice and travel distance. Joint estimation of the models makes a significant difference in the effect of travel distance on willingness to walk to school. The absolute value of the travel distance coefficient in the mode choice model increases by 22% when a joint formulation is adopted instead of the conventional single estimations. We find a significant decrease of 19% in the coefficient of travel safety perception in the joint mode choice model... 

This research addresses the escalation of the ‘discourse of going’ among Iranian educated people in recent years through highlighting the influential role played by for-profit study abroad institutions. Utilizing a discourse-analytic approach, we engage the theoretical concept of chronotope, caliberation, and commodification to investigate the ways through which for-profit study abroad institutions represent the images of ‘life beyond’. The data were obtained in interview sessions with ten certified Iranian study-abroad institutions. The results of the data analysis revealed two main themes, namely, hypothetical utopia there and dystopia here as well as success here-and-now and... 

We first propose a quantitative approach to detect high risk outbreaks of independent and coinfective SIR dynamics on three empirical networks: A school, a conference and a hospital contact network. This measurement is based on the k-means clustering method and identifies proper samples for calculating the mean outbreak size and the outbreak probability. Then we systematically study the impact of different temporal correlations on high risk outbreaks over the original and differently shuffled counterparts of each network. We observe that, on the one hand, in the coinfection process, randomization of the sequence of the events increases the mean outbreak size of high-risk cases. On the other... 

A considerable shift has occurred in mode choice behaviour and escort pattern of students for their school trips around the world during the last few decades. This shift towards using more non-active modes has undesirable consequences, including physical inactivity among students, traffic jams during peak hours, and adverse environmental impacts. Hence, understanding the behaviour of decision-makers with regard to the mode choice and escorting pattern selection is crucial for controlling the trend of the shift and promoting active modes. This study is the first effort to mathematically model the mode choice and accompaniment pattern selection by parents for the school trip of students, in a... 

The use of active modes of travel in school trips has sharply declined for a number of reasons, some of which are rooted in urban design, location of schools, and parental reservations. Thus, policy makers are keen to find practical ways to promote active modes of travel, particularly walking. This study was an effort to determine a tolerable walking distance for school trips and identify factors that made walking trips more reasonable for students. In the vein of understanding the tolerable walking distance, a two-step framework encompassing a random utility method and a hazard-based model was introduced. This framework was applied to a set of data that were collected from middle and high... 

Persian is a fully cursive handwriting in which each character may take different forms in different parts of the word, characters overlap and there is a wide range of possible styles. These complexities make automatic recognition of Persian a very hard task. This paper presents a novel approach on recognition of such writings systems which is based on the description of input stream by a sequence of fuzzy linguistic terms; representation of character patterns with the same descriptive language; and comparison of inputs with character patterns using a novel elastic pattern matching approach. As there is no general benchmark for recognition of Persian handwriting, the approach has been tested...