Sharif Digital Repository

This study investigated Iranian language students' perception of and familiarity with plagiarism, their attitudes toward their professors regarding this issue, and their reasons for doing so. The participants were 122 undergraduate and graduate language students in Translation, Literature, TEFL, and Linguistics who filled out a validated and piloted questionnaire. Overall, the results indicated that students had different views about the definition of plagiarism and plagiarism was mostly perceived by students as using someone else's words as if they were their own rather than taking someone's ideas without permission. It was also found that in their academic career, students mostly consider... 

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 -... 

Reza Aminzadeh talks about the benefits of being a teaching assistant (TA), who assist a faculty member during the teaching of a course by providing additional teaching resources to enhance the quality of instructions for students. A TA can also be an undergraduate student. The duties of a TA range from common tasks including grading, holding office hours, and writing exams. Serving as a TA teaches an engineer a lot of things. It improves their skills and abilities and helps them to perform better in their future academic career. Undergraduate students serving as TAs have the advantage of participating in classroom and teaching activities. This provides them a set of instructional skills... 

The present study was an attempt to explore international English-medium publication in humanities and social sciences in Iran. In so doing, 50 PhD students from 8 humanities and social sciences disciplines, who had already published or attempted to publish in English-medium journals, were requested to write reflection guide accounts and to take part in follow-up semi-structured interviews. The reflection guide and interview data were analyzed based on the principles of grounded theory research yielding the four major themes of motivations, hurdles, strategies, and call for support. The results indicated that the Iranian PhD students in the fields of humanities and social sciences are... 

This study is an effort to quantify potential cost savings of children's walking, as a form of active travel to school. The data were collected in Tehran, from a cross-sectional cohort of more than 4700 high school and middle school students. This study looks at a wide range of policy sensitive variables, such as safety and distance to school in various scenarios. The findings indicate if the safety concerns of parents associated with their children walking to school are alleviated, the direct and indirect annual costs of obesity decreases by US$719 per student. Further, a 1% decrease in the distance from home to school diminishes the annual per capita health costs associated with obesity by... 

This study is an effort to quantify potential cost savings of children's walking, as a form of active travel to school. The data were collected in Tehran, from a cross-sectional cohort of more than 4700 high school and middle school students. This study looks at a wide range of policy sensitive variables, such as safety and distance to school in various scenarios. The findings indicate if the safety concerns of parents associated with their children walking to school are alleviated, the direct and indirect annual costs of obesity decreases by US$719 per student. Further, a 1% decrease in the distance from home to school diminishes the annual per capita health costs associated with obesity by... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the English for publication purpose practices of doctoral students in Iran. The overall objective was to explore their motives, hurdles and strategies in academic writing. Design/methodology/approach: This case study draws on a narrative inquiry to explore nine science and engineering doctoral students’ perceptions of academic publication. The data were analyzed through a hybrid process of inductive and deductive thematic analysis. Findings: The qualitative results showed three dominant themes, namely: motives for publication, hurdles to publication and strategies for dealing with these challenges were extracted. The main sources of... 

Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students’ motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of ESP learners’ motivation. Focussing on engineering fields at three Iranian state universities, this study aimed to identify factors that affect engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses. Using a mixed method design, this study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews with 40... 

Computer networks courses are hard to teach as there are many details in the protocols and techniques involved that are difficult to grasp. Employing programming assignments as part of the course helps students to obtain a better understanding and gain further insight into the theoretical lectures. In this paper, the Partov simulation engine and experience using this engine in a computer networks course are discussed. Since 2009, various programming assignments based on the Partov system have been set to help students in their learning process. Student feedback has been very good; this has been quantified in two surveys in which a majority of students expressed their satisfaction with this... 

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... 

Background. Although the relationship between collective efficacy and group performance has been frequently investigated, a few studies have investigated the development of collective efficacy. Aim. This paper proposes some determinants of collective efficacy in small university groups. Group level hypotheses and research questions relating collective efficacy to collective cognition activities, task interdependence, self-efficacy for group work, and collective orientation were posited. Sample. The sample comprised 145 university students in 40 work-groups. Method. A two-phase longitudinal design was employed in the context of university student groups. All groups were required to perform... 

The efficiency of a learning process directly depends on how well the students are attentive. Detecting the level of attention can help to improve the learning quality. In recent years, there have been several attempts to leverage EEG signal processing as a tool to detect whether a student is attentive or not. In such work, the level of attention is determined by analyzing the EEG power spectrum, which is mostly followed by machine learning approaches. However, the efficiency of such methods for detecting auditory attention of blind or visually-impaired students has not been analyzed. This study aims to investigate such a scenario. To this end, we propose an EEG recording protocol to... 

This study explores the effect of RALL (Robot Assisted Language Learning) on instructing greeting to young EFL (English as Foreign Language) students in Tehran, Iran. To this end, 38 preschool EFL children ranging from 3 to 6 years old were randomly assigned to the RALL (19 students) and game-based (19 students) groups, and the greeting sentences were extracted from the Functional Communication in English book [1] and ESL library website scenarios. In addition, the robot for the RALL group was used as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group the instruction was based on gaming methods such as command, mystery bag, and pass the ball. The instructional duration for both... 

Teachers' self-efficacy beliefs within a foreign language context are helpful in terms of their own conceptualization of effective language teaching. While Foreign Language (FL) literature has established a modest presence in EFL classrooms, the teachers' self-perceptions of efficacy in literature instruction strategies have gone rather unnoticed. The objectives of this study were to discover the impact of EFL teachers' gender and teaching experience on their perceived capabilities as literature instructors. To this end, 61 EFL teachers completed Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale in Literature (Mills, 2011) and background questionnaire indicating their ability in the pedagogy of literature.... 

One of the most difficult aspects of learning a foreign language, particularly in an EFL context, is the retention of vocabulary. Vocabulary learning plays a major role in English language leaner's success. The standard method of presenting up to 20 or more new vocabulary words that students are expected to learn at a given time is not an effective way to help the learners develop vocabulary (Gresten and Baker, 2000). To this end, most ESL/EFL specialists often justify the use of games with reference to the motivation that they can provide for the students. Scholars suggest that many techniques, and word game is one of them. The impact of word game as a reinforcing device on improving... 

Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students’ motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of ESP learners’ motivation. Focussing on engineering fields at three Iranian state universities, this study aimed to identify factors that affect engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses. Using a mixed method design, this study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews with 40... 

COVID-19 is a global public health issue that poses a challenge to the education sector. The pandemic has a devastating impact on student entrepreneurial behavior and their mental health. This study aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the student entrepreneurial intention/behavioral model with a mediating effect of proactive personality and the moderating role of anticipated regret. The sample of the study comprised 345 university students from Pakistan. Data were collected using a self-report and other report survey questionnaires. The hypotheses were investigated using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS–SEM) approach. According to the findings, COVID-19... 

The present study explored Iranian students’ perceptions of unfair instructor behavior in COVID-19 crisis-prompted online language education. Through an online open-ended questionnaire, 91 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students reported their beliefs and experiences concerning instructor injustice in online classes. Results indicated that about two-thirds of the students considered the nature of online courses, particularly their impact on student-instructor relational communication and favoritism, to be a factor leading to teacher unjust behavior. They also identified technological factors, including students’ online communication anxiety, as barriers. Consistent... 

Discouraging the divorce between Language teaching and language testing, dynamic assessment has changed into a strong tool not only for language assessment but also for language development and leaner involvement in the learning process. This study aimed to investigate (a) Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' off-task self-assessment and on-task self-rating of their writing ability and the impact of a dynamic-assessment-based course on the accuracy of their self-assessment and self-rating, and (b) the interrelationships among teacher rating, self-assessment, and self-rating in the writing performance of 22 engineering students taking a writing course as part of an EAP... 

Face to face meetings and physical presence are important concepts in student-professor relations. Many students require flexibility in arranging meetings or the possibility of ad-hoc meeting with their professors. However, adhoc meetings could be difficult to arrange due to busy schedule of professors. It is not unusual for students to attempt several times in a day to catch a professor, or wait an hour behind his door. To overcome this challenge, some professors have teaching assistants (TAs) or office assistant who manage their schedule or provide students with helpful information on how to reach them or handover their documents, projects, etc. Many other professors do not have any...