Teachers’ Perceptions of Reading Instructional Strategies and Reading Assessment Strategies Used In Private High Schools

This research explores private high school teachers’ perceptions of reading instructions and assessment methods used in private high schools, in Al Ain city, in the UAE. The main objective of this study is to investigate reading instructional strategies, reading assessment strategies, the difficulties teachers face while teaching reading and the difficulties high-school students face during reading classes. This study used a mixed-method design to answer the research questions. Quantitative data were collected by using a questionnaire as a first stage (N=73), and qualitative data were later collected through interviews (N=7). The attained results shed light on the current situation of reading in private high schools. They show that high-school teachers use various reading strategies to teach reading. In addition, they use formative and summative assessment strategies of reading to revisit concepts, modify plans and curricula, collect data, identify students’ levels and differentiate instruction. As ESL learners, the lack of reading motivation and habit, the weakness of vocabulary and language structure and the limited critical thinking skills are highlighted. The importance of this study is undeniable, for the findings of this research enrich the literature of research on ESL reading. They also add benefits to reading instructions and assessment strategies in the UAE. Furthermore, teachers, heads of departments, curriculum designers, schools, academic organizations, decision-makers and researchers can build on the findings to gain more benefits for ESL learners. A very important aspect that should be emphasized in teaching reading to high-school students is guiding students on how to independently choose and effectively use reading strategies to comprehend different reading texts. Building reading habits will better help students to improve reading skills, and consequently, improve all other English relative aspects

A New Converter Station Topology to Improve the Overall Performance of a Doubly Fed Induction Generator-Based Wind Energy Conversion System

This thesis presents a reliable and cost effective technique that calls for reconfiguration of the existing converters of a typical Doubly Fed Induction Generator to include a coil of low internal resistance. A coil within the DC link is the only hardware component required to implement this technique. With a proper control scheme, activated during fault conditions, this coil can provide the same degree of performance as a superconducting magnetic energy storage unit during fault conditions

Statistical properties of maximum likelihood estimates for accelerated lifetime data under the Weibull model

Pipe rehabilitation liners are often installed in host pipes that lie below the water table. As such, they are subjected to external hydrostatic pressure. The external pressure leads to early deformation in the liners, which could ultimately lead to its failing or buckling before its expected service lifetime is achieved. Experiments involving long term buckling behavior of liners are typically accelerated lifetime testing procedures. In an accelerated testing procedure a liner is subjected to a constant external hydrostatic pressure and observed until it fails or for a certain time, t whichever occurs first. Liners that do not fail at time t are deemed censored observations. While a constant pressure is convenient to use in experimental situations, in reality pressure fluctuates under soil conditions over time depending on the water table. In this study, constant and variable pressures using the Weibull model for time till buckling under different sample sizes and different levels of censoring were investigated. Data were generated through computer simulation and estimates of parameters in the Weibull model were obtained using the Maximum Likelihood and Newton-Raphson methods. It was concluded that the maximum likelihood estimates under fixed or variable pressure, and for different sample sizes with different levels of censoring, are unbiased. However, the estimates for sample sizes as large as 100 are not normally distributed, especially when the parameter value being estimated is small. It was seen that the lack of normality was manifested in lack of agreement between the observed variance-covariance matrix and the theoretical variance-covariance matrix. These results cast doubt on the use of normal theory for inference concerning certain parameters

Financing Human Capital Development By Increasing The Minimum Wage: Evidence From Canada

This study provides empirical evidence that using the minimum wage as a tool to generate extra taxes to establish a fully publically-funded higher education system is a harmless approach to boost funding for human capital development without changing governments’ spending priorities or raising current tax rates.  The paper proposes a method to finance human capital development through higher education by generating more income taxes from a higher minimum wage and through an effective link of the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in Canada.  The paper also argues that indexed minimum wage adjustments will help in fighting poverty, maintain an acceptable living standard for minimum wage workers, reduce dependence on government subsidies, and make-work more attractive.  The paper concludes that using minimum wage adjustments as a tool to generate tax revenues and fund higher education could be an effective fiscal tool and could be considered a ‘safe political instrument’

Effect of Covid-19 on the electronic payment system: usage level trust and competence perspectives

Covid-19 has dramatically spread globally and dramatically made several effects in almost all sectors. Electronic commerce and electronic payment systems are important sectors which affected directly by the Covid-19 pandemic. Online markets and electronic payment systems have been recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology in the last decade even within normal situations. However, several factors may influence such growth, which many consider as barriers or enablers of using the electronic payment system. This study aims to shed the light on the influence of Covid-19 on the electronic payment system from trust and competence perspectives. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches for data collection and analysis. The data was collected from 31 semi-structured interviews, 718 surveys, and annual reports. NVivo, Microsoft Visio, and Microsoft power business intelligence were used for the data analysis process. As a part of this study, a proposed framework has been developed which includes both technical and managerial parts

Use of C-Map as a Cognitive Tool in Collaborative and Individual Concept Mapping for Enhancing ELL Students\u27 Reading Comprehension

Among those who teach English to English Language Learners (ELL), reading comprehension is considered an essential language skill critical for knowledge acquisition and information exchange. However, in various parts of the world, including Jordan, reading comprehension has been reported as a difficult area for ELL students to master. The purpose of this study was to investigate in-depth the impact of the use of the reading software C-map as a cognitive tool in collaborative and individual concept mapping to promote reading comprehension among ELL readers. The independent variable of this study was concept mapping, which functioned on three levels: collaborative, individual, and control groups. There were four dependent variables: reviewing, listing, enforcing, and overall reading comprehension. 106 ELL high school students from Jordan, aged 17-18 years, participated in the study as subjects, divided into three groups: a collaborative group of 32, an individual group of 36, and a control group of 38. All groups were instructed by the same high school ELL English teacher for 10 weeks. Both the ELL English teacher and the rater received training appropriate to their responsibilities. At the outset of the study, all ELL students took the same pretest individually. They then underwent orientation training appropriate to their groups. Over the course of the study, the students’ work was rated using the same rubric 10 times, one time per a week. At the conclusion of the study, all subjects took the same post-test individually. All instructional materials were accredited by the Jordanian Ministry of Education and the reliability and the validity of study instruments were ensured. The collected data was analyzed quantitatively using the independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA. Results, limitations, and recommendations were discussed and interpreted in light of study’s purpose, questions, and hypotheses

The Changes in the urban roles of the public spaces and its impact on the future plans of Great cities centers

The Great cities center all over the world have common features in its structure, Such as The Historic district that represent the oldest part of the city, the Central Business district "CBD", the Main of public transportation networks, and many other urban components. Those mentioned urban components including Public spaces, such as the Central Parks, Main squares and pedestrians Plazas which represent the Social Activities of a great city center do not exist as the same as in the rest of the city. at the same time they have urban roles within the urban structure of the great cities center. Not only the traditional Urban role but also the new roles that appaiers according to the global changes (political, social, economical, environmental issues) in the 21 century . This paper aims to determine the new urban roles of the public spaces in the great cities center and its impact on future plans, to be applied in the developing plans. Not only on Cairo city center but also on the other world's Great cities.Our Methedology based on analyzing the structure of the Greater Cairo city center, focusing on the distributing, classification of the Public spaces and its urban characteristics. And Using the SWOT analysis to evaluate the existing Public spaces in the Greater Cairo center and its urban performance related to the new social activities.The study found that there are many urban problems about the Public spaces in Cairo city center affect its performance.Cairo center suffers from shortage of the Public spaces, considering that most of its squares designed as automobiles squares, such as the famous square of "El-Tahrir". KEY WORDS: Urban roles, Public spaces, Great Cities, Future plans

Enhancing the Modeling and Efficiency of Photovoltaic Systems

Solar energy is a strong contender among the sustainable alternatives that offer practical potential for replacing increasingly depleted fossil fuels and supplying the world’s growing energy demands. However, despite its sustainability, the spread of its use has been limited due to the high costs arising from its inadequate efficiency. With this challenge as motivation, the goal of the research presented in this thesis was to contribute to the expansion of the utilization of photovoltaic (PV) systems. To achieve this goal, the work was approached from two perspectives: 1) facilitation of research into PV systems through the enhancement of existing PV models and simulation tools, which are highly complex and necessitate substantial computational effort, and 2) improvement of the efficiency of PV systems through the development of new techniques that mitigate power losses in PV systems. With respect to the first perspective, two innovative modeling approaches are introduced. The first, a new circuit model for PV systems, features accuracy comparable to that of existing models but with a reduced computational requirement. The proposed model mimics the accuracy of existing models without their dependency on a transcendental implicit equation, thus providing a shorter computational time without sacrifying the accuracy. The second modeling approach, which was developed for use in model-based online applications, involved the creation of a fast tool for estimating the power peaks of the power-voltage curves for partially shaded PV systems. Utilizing a PV circuit model for estimating the power peaks in large PV systems through the simulation of their entire power curve consumes extensive computational time, which is unacceptable for online applications even with the use of the proposed circuit model mentioned above. Rather than employing a PV circuit model to find the power peaks, the proposed tool relies on simple rules that govern the formation of power peaks in a partially shaded PV system as a means of establishing the power peaks directly, thus significantly reducing the time required. The second perspective led to the development of three methods for reducing different types of power losses prevalent in PV systems. The first is an MPPT technique for use with partially shaded PV systems that exhibit multiple power peaks in their output power curves. The proposed MPPT is uniquely distinguishable because of its ability to eliminate misleading power losses in PV systems. Rather than searching and scanning heuristically for the GMPP, it employs the fast modeling tool mentioned above to calculate the location of the GMPP deterministically, thus avoiding the need for curve scanning. The irradiance values required by the modeling tool are estimated innovatively using captured images of the PV modules obtained by an optical camera. The objective of the second was to reduce the mismatch power losses common in partially shaded PV systems through the development of an improved PV reconfiguration method. The reconfiguration proposed in this thesis is produced by a simple algorithm that establishes a better configuration and requires only negligible computational time for ensuring the minimization of mismatch power losses. The third is an enhanced maximum power point tracker (MPPT) for reducing tracking power losses in PV systems that operate under rapidly changing irradiance levels. The proposed method combines model-based and heuristic techniques in order to accelerate the tracking speed and thus decrease this type of loss. In the proposed MPPT, the temperature measurements typically necessary in any model-based PV application have been eliminated through reliance on a new set of equations capable of estimating the temperature through the utilization of current and voltage measurements

Enhancing image captioning with depth information using a Transformer-based framework

Captioning images is a challenging scene-understanding task that connects computer vision and natural language processing. While image captioning models have been successful in producing excellent descriptions, the field has primarily focused on generating a single sentence for 2D images. This paper investigates whether integrating depth information with RGB images can enhance the captioning task and generate better descriptions. For this purpose, we propose a Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework for generating a multi-sentence description of a 3D scene. The RGB image and its corresponding depth map are provided as inputs to our framework, which combines them to produce a better understanding of the input scene. Depth maps could be ground truth or estimated, which makes our framework widely applicable to any RGB captioning dataset. We explored different fusion approaches to fuse RGB and depth images. The experiments are performed on the NYU-v2 dataset and the Stanford image paragraph captioning dataset. During our work with the NYU-v2 dataset, we found inconsistent labeling that prevents the benefit of using depth information to enhance the captioning task. The results were even worse than using RGB images only. As a result, we propose a cleaned version of the NYU-v2 dataset that is more consistent and informative. Our results on both datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively benefits from depth information, whether it is ground truth or estimated, and generates better captions. Code, pre-trained models, and the cleaned version of the NYU-v2 dataset will be made publically available.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 13 table