ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Count Data Regression Analysis: Concepts, Overdispersion Detection, Zero-Inflation Identification, and Applications with R
Author: Fávero, Luiz Paulo
Date: 2021-06-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Regression (Statistics),Selection,Statistical Analysis,Models,Computation,Programming Languages,High School Students,Foreign Countries,National Competency Tests

In this paper is proposed a straightforward model selection approach that indicates the most suitable count regression model based on relevant data characteristics. The proposed selection approach includes four of the most popular count regression models (i.e. Poisson, negative binomial, and respective zero-inflated frameworks). Moreover, it addresses two of the most relevant problems commonly found in real-world count datasets, namely overdispersion and zero-inflation. The entire selection approach may be performed using the programming language R, being all commands used throughout the paper available for practical purposes. It is worth mentioning that counting regression models are still not widespread within the social sciences.
The Impact of Using Input Enhancement Techniques in the Use of Frequent Collocations via Reading on Restatement in Writing of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners
Author: Fakhrzadeh, Shima
Date: 2020-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Phrase Structure,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Foreign Countries,Teaching Methods,Linguistic Input,Reading Processes,Writing (Composition),Comparative Analysis,Pretests Posttests,Language Tests,Scores,Instructional Effectiveness

The pedagogical value of collocations has gained much attention in recent years. Collocations provide learners with a powerful organizing principle for language. The present study aimed to examine the efficiency of enhancing the input data provided via reading including frequent collocations in writing restatements of EFL students. Therefore, the independent variable was input enhancement in the use of frequent collocations via reading and the dependent variable was EFL learners' restatement in writing. The sample in this study consisted of 60 intermediate EFL learners of both genders registered in the Attar language institute in Tehran. They were randomly assigned to 30-member experimental and control groups. A teacher-made language achievement test was administered as a pre-test and post-test following the placement test of the Oxford series &quot;Solutions.&quot; The experimental group received the instruction under enhanced input within the given reading texts. However, the control group received a regular type of instruction. The findings revealed that the scores obtained by students performing in the control group were considerably lower than the ones in the experimental group who received enhanced texts as input.
Examination of the Prediction of Different Dimensions of Analytic Relations&apos; Impact on Academic Reading Comprehension: An Inter-Group Comparative Study
Author: Hasan, Md. Kamrul
Date: 2020-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Prediction,Academic Language,Reading Comprehension,Second Language Instruction,Second Language Learning,Business Administration Education,Engineering Education,Comparative Analysis,Vocabulary Skills,Reading Tests,Language Proficiency,Language Tests,Thinking Skills,English (Second Language),English for Academic Purposes,Higher Education,Undergraduate Students,Foreign Countries

An in-depth investigation of analytic relations by lexical researchers plays a prominent role in language learning and teaching. The primary objective of the present study was to investigate the extent to which prediction regarding different aspects of analytic relations impacts reading comprehension. The current research employed a quantitative approach using standard multiple regression analysis. The study compared two language proficiency tests, namely an analytic relations test and an academic reading comprehension test, among a total of 91 participants with a Bachelor of Business Administration background and a total of 64 students with a Bachelor of Engineering background. The results of the study showed that for both the Business and Engineering School students, the component-integral analytic relations facet of vocabulary depth knowledge was not only the most statistically significant contributing predictor of academic reading comprehension, but it also had the largest effect (i.e., statistically significant) in explaining the outcome variable: Academic reading comprehension. By providing insights into the research gap, the present study suggests that the analytic relations dimension of vocabulary knowledge has practical use for English language learners and English teachers at the tertiary level, and it offers further implications for lexical researchers.
Environmental Education through Art: A Creative Teaching Approach
Author: Fragkoulis, Iosif
Date: 2018-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Environmental Education,Sculpture,Art Materials,Art Products,Creativity,Teaching Methods,Recycling,Experiential Learning,Cooperative Learning,Discovery Learning,Aesthetic Education,Critical Thinking,Adult Students

The present study describes a creative teaching approach utilizing two works of art in environmental education teaching, making the teaching of material recycling and reuse more experiential, participatory, and original. The third work of art, selected and presented by the learners themselves, &quot;completed the picture&quot; of this innovative approach. Therefore, as the study proves to have the right encouragement, the learners can broaden their cognitive capacities, while through discovery learning they can come in contact with artworks that they did not even know that existed until recently.
Professional Learning Opportunities and Challenges among Student-Teachers during the Teaching Practice in Nyamagana District, Tanzania
Author: Ndibalema, Placidius
Date: 2018-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Student Teachers,Educational Opportunities,Instruction,Student Teaching,Self Efficacy,Self Esteem,Barriers,Communities of Practice,Student Evaluation,Teacher Collaboration,Mentors,Teaching Skills,Competence

This study investigated professional learning opportunities that student-teachers attained and the challenges they encountered during the teaching practice in Nyamagana District. Questionnaire and interview guide were used to collect the data. One hundred and eighty (180) student-teachers (respondents) from 14 higher learning institutions who were doing the teaching practice in secondary schools in 2018 were selected using simple random sampling. Furthermore, purposeful sampling procedures were employed in selecting few student-teachers who were leaders of the group from each school. The results showed that teaching practice increases student-teachers' confidence and competence in lesson preparation, content, records management, classroom management, and moral values. It was also revealed that teaching practice helps student-teachers to be exposed to mentorship and teaching experiences. In the case of challenges, it was revealed that student-teachers face a problem of lack of sufficient instructional materials, insufficient orientation, poor working environment, lack of adequate skills to manage students with special needs and aggressive behaviour as well as over-crowded classrooms. Again, it was revealed that schools had no appropriate strategies for creating professional learning community and variation in assessment strategies and conflicting comments from assessors were other the challenges. The study recommends an integrated approach for effective implementation of teaching practice where school-based cooperating teachers, school-based mentors and University supervisors should work collaboratively to ensure a student-teacher has room to explore, discover and acquire professional attributes regarding teaching. A blended mentorship approach which includes face to face and online sessions for student-teacher is thought to be a worthy strategy to improve teaching practice.
A Practical Guide to Instrument Development and Score Validation in the Social Sciences: The MEASURE Approach
Author: Kalkbrenner, Michael T.
Date: 2021-01-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Test Construction,Test Validity,Social Sciences,Psychometrics,Assessment Literacy,Test Reliability,Factor Analysis

The research and practice of social scientists who work in a myriad of different specialty areas involve developing and validating scores on instruments as well as evaluating the psychometric properties of existing instrumentation for use with research participants. In this article, the author introduces The MEASURE Approach to instrument development, an acronym of seven empirically supported steps for instrument development, and initial score validation that he developed based on the recommendations of leading psychometric researchers and based on his own extensive background in instrument development. Implications for how The MEASURE Approach has utility for enhancing the assessment literacy of social scientists who work in a variety of different specialty areas are discussed.
Beyond p-Values: Using Bayesian Data Analysis in Science Education Research
Author: Kubsch, Marcus
Date: 2021-02-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Data Analysis,Bayesian Statistics,Educational Research,Science Education,Data Interpretation,Replication (Evaluation),Hypothesis Testing,High School Students,Graduate Students,College Faculty,Foreign Countries,Scientific Attitudes,Scientists

In light of the replication crisis in psychology, null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST) and &quot;p&quot;-values have been heavily criticized and various alternatives have been proposed, ranging from slight modifications of the current paradigm to banning &quot;p&quot;-values from journals. Since the physics education research community often relies on quantitative statistical approaches, the challenges the replication crisis poses to these approaches need to be considered. &quot;p&quot;-values suffer primarily from the fact that they carry little information by themselves and lend themselves to misinterpretations. As one alternative, Bayesian approaches have become increasingly popular as the posterior distributions they provide carry more relevant information than &quot;p&quot;-values. In this paper, we discuss practical issues related to &quot;p-values&quot; with respect to interpreting and communicating results and how these issues can be addressed using a Bayesian approach. Drawing on a science education data set, we demonstrate how Bayesian data analysis methods go beyond p-values and can help to make more valid conclusions and to communicate them more easily in a manner that lends itself to less misinterpretations.
Conditional Standard Error of Measurement: Classical Test Theory, Generalizability Theory and Many-Facet Rasch Measurement with Applications to Writing Assessment
Author: Huebner, Alan
Date: 2021-06-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Error of Measurement,Test Theory,Generalizability Theory,Item Response Theory,Writing Tests,Test Reliability,Foreign Countries,Grade 8

Writing assessments often consist of students responding to multiple prompts, which are judged by more than one rater. To establish the reliability of these assessments, there exist different methods to disentangle variation due to prompts and raters, including classical test theory, Many Facet Rasch Measurement (MFRM), and Generalizability Theory (G-Theory). Each of these methods defines a standard error of measurement (SEM), which is a quantity that summarizes the overall variability of student scores. However, less attention has been given to conditional SEMs (CSEM), which expresses the variability for scores of individual students. This tutorial summarizes how to obtain CSEMs for each of the three methods, illustrates the concepts on real writing assessment data, and provides computational resources for CSEMs including an example of a specification file for the FACETS program for MFRM and R code to compute CSEMs for G-theory.
A Scrutiny of Bilingualism Impact: Outcomes of a Discourse Marker Intervention for Monolinguals and Bilinguals in Iran
Author: Marefat, Fahimeh
Date: 2020-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Bilingualism,Monolingualism,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Language Teachers,Comparative Analysis,Accuracy,Intervention,Teaching Methods,Student Needs,Recall (Psychology),Multiple Choice Tests,Language Tests,Foreign Countries,Models,Discourse Analysis,Written Language,Turkish,Indo European Languages,Adult Students,Native Language,Literacy

Delving into the linguistic performance of EFL learners with varying linguistic backgrounds and potentials appears to be of huge significance, particularly in EFL classrooms. The knowledge of the potential variations between monolingual and bilingual EFL learners might help teachers better meet the needs of these learners, for instance through differentiated instruction for them. Accordingly, through a ten-session intervention on discourse markers (DMs), and providing sixty upper-intermediate Iranian monolingual and bilingual EFL learners with equal DM knowledge, the present study aimed to discover if bilingualism could lead to variations in DM usage, accuracy and recall between the two groups. Initially, to examine DM usage, the study explored the frequency of DM types and tokens, and to study DM usage accuracy, it examined the hurdles to DM employment (i.e., overuse, underuse, and misuse) in the participants' 180 paragraphs. To examine DM recall, we aimed at discovering whether the learners significantly varied in their performance on a DM multiple-choice test after attending the same ten-session intervention. With respect to DM usage, we observed minimal variation, with the monolinguals and bilinguals differing only in their use of exemplifier and conclusive markers, while indicating a similar pattern and range of DM tokens. Similarly, concerning DM usage accuracy, the groups mainly manifested a similar pattern but varied only due to the bilinguals' extreme overuse of DMs. However, the results concerning DM recall disclosed bilinguals as outperforming monolinguals significantly. The findings offer suggestions for the importance of understanding monolingual and bilingual EFL learners' linguistic performance.
Iraqi Kurd EFL Learners&apos; Uses of Conjunctive Adverbials in Essays
Author: Aziz, Awder Raza
Date: 2021-06-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Ethnic Groups,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Foreign Countries,Form Classes (Languages),Essays,Connected Discourse,Academic Language,Writing Skills,Sentences,Computational Linguistics,Word Frequency,Language Usage,Classification,Undergraduate Students,Teaching Methods

The quality of any academic essay highly depends on cohesion and coherence since they affect the overall quality and the tone of the writing to a great extent. Conjunctive adverbials are among the types of devices which logically help linking sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into essays. Conjunctive Adverbials ultimately affect the cohesion and coherence of any piece of writing. This paper investigates conjunctive adverbials in essays written by Iraqi Kurd EFL learners at the undergraduate level. It explicitly attempts to discover what specific conjunctive adverbials types are overused, underused, or misused and in what positions in sentences. A learner corpus of 50 complete essays was compiled for this study. The findings showed that the participants tended to use more sequential and additive conjunctive adverbials than adversative and causals. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the learners relied heavily on a limited number of conjunctive adverbials, mainly in the initial position. However, the conjunctive adverbial category affects its place in the sentence.
Pragma-Linguistic and Socio-Pragmatic Transfer among Iraqi Female EFL Learners in Refusing Marriage Proposals
Author: Qassim, Tabarek Ali
Date: 2021-06-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Pragmatics,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Taxonomy,Speech Acts,Females,Task Analysis,Transfer of Training,Sociolinguistics,Marriage,North Americans,North American English,Contrastive Linguistics,Social Status,Foreign Countries,College Students,Social Distance,Cultural Differences

In the framework of this study, the phenomenon of transfer is probed pragma-linguistically and socio-linguistically concerning marriage situations among Iraqi EFL learners. The study also strives to look at the refusal strategies most commonly employed by Iraqi female English as a foreign Language (EFL) learners compared to their counterparts, American native speakers of English. The study involved 70 female participants who answered a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which contained ten marriage proposals to be refused. Each situation entailed refusal of a person from a higher, an equal, and lower status. The researchers adapted Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss Weltz's (1990) taxonomy of refusal for analyzing the data comprehensively. The study's findings indicated that Iraqi female EFL learners followed similar patterns of refusing marriage situations to American speakers. The most prevalent strategies used by the two groups were &quot;reasons/ excuses and explanations,&quot; followed by &quot;statements of regrets,&quot; and then &quot;non-performative statements&quot; with slight variation in frequency. However, the Iraqi learners' native language and culture affected how they formulated their refusal; hence they manifested pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic transfer in particular areas. The areas of pragma-linguistic transfer included the literal translation of words, expressions, and structures into their refusal in English. As for the socio-pragmatic areas, the transfer occurred in certain Arabic culture features like elaboration, exaggeration, repetition, endearing terms, and many others in expressing the target language, English.
Saudi Female EFL Undergraduates&apos; Knowledge, Perceptions, Problems, and Suggestions for Research Method Courses
Author: Alghizzi, Talal Musaed
Date: 2021-06-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Females,Undergraduate Students,Student Attitudes,Knowledge Level,Barriers,English (Second Language),Research Papers (Students),Research Proposals,Proposal Writing,Research Training,Research Methodology,Foreign Countries

This study aimed to analyze English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' knowledge and perceptions of research method courses in the Department of English Language and Literature, at Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU). It also investigated the problems that students encounter and offered some suggestions for improving these courses. The significance of the study is that such topic has never been investigated before in such context. The study participants were 1,022 students (Levels three, four, five, six and seven) who voluntarily filled out a questionnaire consisting of sections on four factors/themes: knowledge, perceptions, problems, and suggestions. The collected data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics software to compare the students' answers, and a one-way analysis of variance test was used to detect the differences between academic levels regarding each theme. The results showed that regardless of the students' academic levels, all of them agreed on studying and therefore knowing the research basic components; however, regarding the elements constituting each of these basic components, significant differences were found between the five groups. The results also indicated that these students have positive perceptions of the courses even though they encountered some research-related problems such as in knowing all or some research basic components and their specific elements; writing all or some of them; citing, summarizing, and paraphrasing sources; allocating primary and secondary resources; collecting and analyzing data; and consulting research manuals. Finally, all students agreed that it would be helpful if they were assigned individual research supervisors and coauthored an article with them, a research course was taught in all academic levels for a bachelor's degree, a research club was established, and research seminars were held.
English Learners&apos; Perceptions of Video Games as a Medium for Learning and Integration into the English Curriculum
Author: Alrajhi, Assim S.
Date: 2020-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Video Games,Learning Processes,Teaching Methods,Learning Motivation,Independent Study,Student Attitudes,Semitic Languages,Native Speakers,State Universities,Undergraduate Students,Foreign Countries,Language Variation,Positive Attitudes,Metalinguistics,Technology Integration,Curriculum Development

This study explores L2 learners' perceptions of different dimensions of current commercial video games as a medium to foster English learning. Moreover, it looks into L2 learners' attitudes toward the integration of gaming into the English curriculum. To that end, a quantitative approach to data collection and analysis was employed. Responses were elicited using an online questionnaire that consisted of 29 items from 101 Arabic speaking students enrolled in an English and Translation bachelor program at a Saudi public university. The findings of the descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) indicate that the participants positively perceive English learning through the medium of video games. According to students' views, several factors and elements conducive to English learning are recognized in commercial video games. These include knowledge of some aspects of English that are not taught in educational settings, predisposition to use English, more opportunities for practicing English, long-term retention of encountered-then-learned language points, independent learning, motivation to learn and deal with English, a comfortable environment for using English, and familiarity with vernacular Englishes. Meanwhile, the findings reveal that learners have positive attitudes toward the integration of gaming into the English curriculum, and they sanction the place of gaming in formal education, provided that current commercial video games need modifications to render optimal L2 learning outcomes.
Creating an Evaluation Factor for Group Work Assessment
Author: Mark, Scott
Date: 2021-05-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Evaluation Methods,Cooperative Learning,Student Evaluation,Justice,College Students,Self Evaluation (Individuals),Peer Evaluation

The idea of group work assessment is often seen as complicated, but necessary given the value of group work to learning. However, the traditional method involving a collective grade has been shown to be a less effective option, and raises questions about fairness for the students. Utilizing an evaluation factor provides a more inclusive assessment strategy, factoring in peer and self-assessment to enhance the reliability of the assessment. Through the evaluation factor, an instructor can maintain the product of the group work as the foundation of assessment, while allowing the process of the group work to be reflected in the evaluation factor. In this way, the evaluation factor provides a lens through which each individual in the group is more comprehensively assessed, and concerns for fairness are addressed.