Nowadays, Research and Development (R&D) units are the core of research activities in the industry sector and designing processes leading to new products and services is acknowledged as the major source of competitive advantage. The ultimate goal in R&D units is to facilitate the production of new products through increasing knowledge, creating processes and enhancing R&D capabilities. Hence, the purpose of this study was to identify and prioritize the components of R&D productivity enhancement in the power plants and energy supply in line with optimal policy making. The collected research data were analyzed via confirmatory factor analysis and the components of R&D capabilities were prioritized via Structural Equations using SMART PLS3 software. The analytic network process was also used to prioritize the components of upgrading R&D capabilities. The content validity of the final research model comprising 8 factors and 50 indices was confirmed. After processing the model, 5 indices were removed and the final model with 45 indices was confirmed. The results showed that paying attention to all 8 components and their indicators is important and influential in the R&D capabilities of these industries. The findings indicated that of all components, the human resource capability, financing capabilities, and technological infrastructure supply were respectively of prime importance in upgrading R&D capabilities.

Fostering critical thinking among senior high school students in Colombia has been an unfulfilled goal. This undesirable situation has multiple causes: “critical thinking” has become a mere slogan and its meaning and scope have not been clearly specified despite being widely used in the different levels of the education system. Furthermore, the strategies designed to teach critical thinking lack creativity, reinforce rote learning and the sheer repetition of logic rules besides misallocating the goal of reasoning and argumentation by focusing only on rhetorical persuasion. Textbooks and core literature in critical thinking suggest that a critical thinker is someone who always has plenty of arguments to defend her beliefs besides being ready to address even destructive criticism. By contrast, critical rationalism emphasizes the importance of a humble approach, acknowledges error, and portrays a critical thinker as someone who is ready to test her most beloved theories against experience and to reject them in the light of the facts that contradict her beliefs and certainties. We consider that a pedagogical approach enriched with fallibilism might be central for a better education and endorse these views with the results of a case study conducted in Manizales, Colombia, which shows that teaching the basics of logic and argumentation by using the central tenets of critical rationalism fosters critical thinking among senior high school students

Aim: The purpose of this study was to present a model of empowerment management for secondary school administrators in Tehran city. Methods: This research was applied in terms of purpose, qualitative in terms of data and data base in terms of research method. Academic experts and educational managers were considered as the study population that using the debt snowball method with 18 interviews, the researcher found that the collected information had reached saturation point. The data collection tool was a review of national and international documents related to the subject as well as a semi-structured exploratory interview. Results: The findings indicated that the identified dimensions for the model of empowerment of for secondary school administrators in Tehran include some dimensions such as general abilities, puberty abilities, intellectual perceptual abilities, leadership abilities, interpersonal abilities, and organizational-managerial abilities. In order to validate the final model, the Delphi technique was used, which confirms the research findings. Conclusion: It could be said that the dimensions of empowerment model in this study was a complete combination of internal and external researches that none of them has achieved beyond these 6 dimensions.

The purpose of this study is measuring total factor productivity (TFP) growth of sugar beet for different provinces of Iran and then decomposing it to the changes in technical change, managerial efficiency change and scale efficiency change. For this purpose we used the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method and Malmquist productivity index. Results showed that average growth of total factor productivity of sugar beet in country level has been 47 percent during 2000-2007. On the other hand, comparisons between provinces indicate negative TFP growth for Ghazvin, Markazi and Hamedan provinces. Negative growth of productivity in these provinces is often due to managerial technical inefficiency. So, this study proposes that these three provinces, could improve their TFP growth by following successful provinces.