Background and Aim: Presbycusis is a prevalent chronic condition in the elderly which may have potential adverse effects on social and emotional aspects of their life. There is no one to one relationship between audiogram and the perceived handicap in elderly. A good way to measure hearing handicap are self-assessment tools. This study was aimed to translate, adapt and establish face validity of Short form of Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly (HHIE-S) and the correlation with pure-tone and speech audiometry results as well as score of the other self-assessmnet tool (Self-Assessment of Communication: SAC) in the Iranian elderly. Methods: HHIE-S was translated into Persian and face validity was established. It was administered in 80 elderly participants. Correlation of their scores with their pure tone averages of 3 and 4 frequencies (PTA0. 5-1-2 and PTA0. 5-1-2-4), word recognition score (WRS) in quiet, and SAC scores was determined. Results: The experts mean scores to PHHIE-S was 99. 63%. There were significant correlations between PHHIE-S with SAC (r = 0. 89; p < 0. 001), PTA0. 5-1-2 (r = 0. 4; p < 0. 001), PTA0. 5-1-2-4 (r = 0. 6; p <0. 001) and WRS (r =-0. 4; p < 0. 001). There was no significant gender effect on any of the measures (p > 0. 05). Conclusion: Simply evaluation of the hearing levels is not adequate in elderly. Self-assessment tools can shed light on the specific disability induced by hearing loss. PHHIE-S appears to be an easy and fast tool that may helpful to distinguish patients who might need rehabilitative services.

Introduction: The main objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of preceding pictorial stimulus on the emotional autonomic responses of the subsequent one.Methods: To this effect, physiological signals, including Electrocardiogram (ECG), Pulse Rate (PR), and Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) were collected. As these signals have random and chaotic nature, nonlinear dynamics of these physiological signals were evaluated with the methods of nonlinear system theory. Considering the hypothesis that emotional responses are usually associated with previous experiences of a subject, the subjective ratings of 4 emotional states were also evaluated. Four nonlinear characteristics (including Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), based parameters, Lyapunov exponent, and approximate entropy) were implemented. Nine standard features (including mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, median, mode, the second, third, and fourth moment) were also extracted.Results: To evaluate the ability of features in discriminating different types of emotions, some classification approaches were appraised, of them, Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) led to the best classification rate of 100%. The results show that considering the emotional sequences, GSR is the best candidate for the representation of the physiological changes.Discussion: Lower discrimination was attained when the sequence occurred in the diagonal line of valence-arousal coordinates (for instance, positive valence and positive arousal versus negative valence and negative arousal). By employing self-assessment ranks, no obvious improvement was achieved.

The purpose of this article is responding to the question of “How is the quality of teacher feedback, studentsʼ self-evaluation and peer evaluation? ” The research method is a combination of "documentary, descriptive and survey”. The sample was selected through a multi-stage stratified sampling, out of which 64 primary schools, located in 30 local educational districts in 3 provinces (East Azerbaijan, Fars and Bushehr) were selected. One checklist to analyze the portfolios and one interview form with acceptable reliability and validity were used. The findings show that teacher’ feedbacks are beyond the student’s performance, the content of the feedback is not related to the learning goals and objectives, and the descriptions are not appealing enough and do not fit the studentsʼ level of progress. Although the feedback did not contain anything with regard to providing a chance for the students to compersate for their weaknesses, they were polite to some extent. In self evaluation, students did not have the necessary skills. Weakness in four selfevaluation skills in the lower grades was more evident. Teachers use limited methods for peer-assessment and are less familiar with the concepts and methods of peer-asssessent.

Background: According to the World Health Organization, hospitals should assess their internal wards to improve health promotion services using self-assessment tools. To achieve this goal, standards of health promoting hospitals have been developed by the World Health Organization, and measurable elements and indicators have been defined to facilitate the practical application of these standards in planning, implementation, and evaluation of health promotion in hospitals. Moreover, a form has been developed for this self-assessment. Considering linguistic and cultural differences in various countries, standards must be written in equivalent texts and, then, their content and face validity should be examined. Performing this process in a systemic and scientific way can guarantee that the same tools have been used, and thus the results obtained from different hospitals are comparable. Methods: After the preparation phase (considering research aim, obtaining permission from the original designers, and determining the time), the following activities were done: translating the form from its original language to the target language, combining and compiling initial translations to a single translation, reversing the final version of the translation from the target language to the original language, obtaining cognitive information, revising and concluding, and determining the content and face validity of the translated form and final report. After filling in the form, face validity was calculated using impact score formula. Content validity was measured using content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI). Results: After calculating the impact score, all 40 items showed a high impact score greater than 1. 5, representing the fact that all items are important. The minimum value of CVR for each of the 40 items was estimated to be 0. 64; CVI of all items was greater than 0. 79. Conclusion: Given the input of the standards of health promoting hospitals affiliated to the World Health Organization in National Accreditation of Iranian hospitals, the form was translated and found to be valid according to content and face validity and is available in Persian to be used in Iranian hospitals (Appendix 1).

Alternative assessment approaches and, among them, self-assessment and peer assessment are becoming increasingly important in educational contexts. Designed to compare self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment, this study included 90 EFL students from 3 intact classes divided into 3 groups: selfassessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment. After taking the TOEFL Proficiency Test (2004) and a writing pretest asking the participants to write a 150-word paragraph, the participants were trained upon the writing complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) scale of Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998). Before sitting the 2 posttests requiring the participants to write a 150-word paragraph, the selfassessment and peer-assessment groups assessed their own and peers’ writings, respectively, whereas the third group had their teacher assess their writings. Results of one-way ANOVA demonstrated that teacher-assessment was not as effective as self-assessment and peer-assessment in terms of enhancing their writing proficiency. Results have important implications for educational organizations and curriculum designers who look for the most appropriate methods of teaching and testing.

Self-assessment has developed as one of the techniques for the continuous improvement of organizations processes in recent years. Appropriate design and accurate implementation of self-assessment system in an organization allows the management to make decisions based on realities rather than relying on conjectures. Hence, an effective self-assessment model for large organizations was dealt with in this research. The statistical population of this research included all managers, internal auditors and experts of Tehran municipality among which 70 people were randomly selected as the sample. To collect the required data, a questionnaire was used. To estimate the related validity and reliability indexes, content analysis and Cronbach Alpha were run, respectively. To test the research hypotheses, Spearman Correlation Coefficient was calculated. The results showed that the suggested model for selfassessment may have significant effects through proper training.

The present study set out to inspect how organizational and pragmatic knowledge can be functions of the assessment techniques practices implemented in the classroom. To this aim, the effects of teacher, peer, and self-assessment techniques that focused on providing feedback on pragmatic and organizational knowledge were compared. A total number of 98 female Iranian learners studying at pre-intermediate level in a language institute participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of the three groups of self-assessment (SA) (N = 32), peer-assessment (PA) (N = 33), and teacher-assessment (TA) (N = 33). Pragmatic competence was gauged using Discourse Role Play Talks (DRPTs) and organizational knowledge was assessed by a scale covering the grammatical and textual knowledge of the participants. The results of the analysis of one-way ANOVA test indicated that selfassessment followed by peer assessment had an advantage over the teacher assessment technique in promoting both pragmatic and organizational competence. In general, the obtained results yielded support for the employment of alternative methods of assessment as pedagogical tools to foster language competence. Implications for EFL pedagogy are discussed.

Considering the leading role of needs analysis (NA) in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses and the necessity of reconsidering such courses in Iran, this study was designed to investigate the present and target academic English language needs of undergraduate physiotherapy students through triangulation of sources and methods. To this aim, data were elicited from 132 undergraduates, 20 graduates working as physiotherapists, 20 content teachers, and 9 language teachers at four medical universities in Tehran. The quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through two versions of an NA questionnaire and semi-structured interview protocols, respectively. The findings indicated that, although most of the skills and sub-skills in target needs were considered important or very important by all the stakeholders, there were differences in the preferences and priorities of different groups. The results of the selfassessment section also revealed the skills in which the students need improvement. The findings also signified some issues and options in EAP courses for physiotherapy students and promise implications for refining and enhancing EAP courses and materials through triangulating the multiple points of view on the students' target needs and demands of their present situation.

Objective: Performance evaluation (PE) is one of the critical activities in the assessment and improvement of management systems. Performance evaluations are done with different aims and approaches. Self-Assessment (SA) is considered as one of the most important performance evaluation methods. And, learning focus is one of the strengths of SA compared to the other performance evaluation methods. Like the other PE methods, SA has some weaknesses such as human error during performance measurement. Consequently, researches have been trying to identify the human effect on the selfassessment process. Methods: To achieve the mentioned goal, the results of the sustainable excellence (H3SE) model between 121 experts of 42 Petrochemical companies have been analyzed. The role of the intervening variables in performing self-assessment tests (e. g. age, gender, educational degree, and related experience) have been investigated. Results: Result of research reveals that the mentioned variables do not have a significant intervening impact on excellence. Conclusion: Since the present research uses a biographical variable as an intervening variable, it seems that there are unknown variables that weren’ t considered. In addition because of the statistical population (Petrochemical Industries) generalizability of research finding to the other research is impossible.