JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
Year:2005 | Volume:21 | Issue:1 (81)|Papers Count:6

One of the shortcomings of our educational system is the fact that student achievement is assessed competitively. The problem with such an assessment is that after a while individuals are categorized into strong, medium, and weak groupings where the former group soon realizes that it is out shined by others and hence loses all motivations for doing any effort. As a result, identification and utilization of effective strategies for preventing academic failure through attention to individual differences and building up motivation in the classroom seem inevitable.The present study aimed at comparing the methods of individual competition, individual effort, and group competition, utilized a sample of 195 high school freshman girls from the 11th educational district in Tehran who were selected through a cluster sampling method. Data were collected using teacher made tests through out the session and were analyzed using one way ANOVA. The results indicated that:1- The individual effort method is more effective than the individual competition method.2- Although the two methods of individual effort and group competition did not show any significant difference, the former is more desirable since it stresses student interests and helps with his/ her mental health.

Studying the way that decisions are made and plans are drawn for the academic calendar could lead to the recognition of probable problems and the necessary improvements. This in this paper, the extent of the instructional time in Iran is compared to that of some other countries and the difficulties of the currents academic calendar are examined. The method used is descriptive/ analytical and the statistical population was consisted of three groups of high school teachers, principals, and teaching experts in Esfahan and Yazd from which 180 teachers and 35 principals were selected randomly. The selection of 16 experts was not random? A questionnaire was used to collect data from the first two groups. The experts were interviewed.The results indicate that the real time spent on learning/ teaching in Iran is lower than that in the developed countries. Furthermore, the academic calendar seems to have prepared the grounds for some difficulties such as learners' anxiety, teachers fatigue, discouragement, early burnout, and reduced efficiency.

PIRLS is a comparative study of children's reading skills conducted by the IEA in 35 countries. The level of reading literacy among the mostly nine- years old students was assessed. This meant that in most of the participating countries, including Iran, the fourth graders were the main sources of data on factors related to reading literacy. The findings show that: The Iranian students performed significantly lower than the other groups and below the international average.The Iranian fourth graders performed much better in literary texts than the informational texts.Average performance of the Iranian students in over all score and informational text was similar and better than the Kuwaiti, Moroccan, and Belizean groups, whereas for the literary texts the results rank Iranians above Argentines and the other groups.Students from Sweden, Holland, and England achieved highest scores. Summaries of the national and international findings along with analyses on possible factors leading to the results are given in these reports.  

The main purpose of this research has been to study the effect of brainstorming on students' creativity. The necessary data were collected through a pre-post test design with a control group utilizing Aubedi Test of Creativity. The sample consisted of 80 eight graders equally divided along gender and experimental/ control lines who were selected randomly. Following a three month long course in which brainstorming was used in discussing different topics among the experimental group, the data were analyzed using the analysis of Covariance Method. The findings indicate that brainstorming increases the creativity of both boys and girls. As for the four components of creativity, the effect of brainstorming on initiative, fluidity, and flexibility components among the boys and on fluidity and elaboration components among the girls was statistically significant.

In this study the skills of those first graders who have been taught how to read using the composite method of sound- word were assessed in both sounding and word reading areas. The randomly selected sample consisted of 100 students who had just started the second grade and were observed transitionally. The reading tasks utilized in this study were reading unfamiliar texts, reading irregular words, reading word look-alikes, and dictation which was designed by the researchers based on the first grade reading textbook.Students performed within the normal range of 3-4 errors in reading the text, the word look- alkies, and the irregular words. However their reading speed was rather low as they took close to 2 seconds to read irregular words. This could be indicative of their ability to use the sounding techniques better than the whole word reading technique.The dictation scores were significantly lower than the reading scores and the girls scored better on reading text, irregular words, and dictation than the boys, but not on the reading of word look – a likes!