Substantial and sustained reduction in under-5 mortality, diarrhea, and pneumonia in Oshikhandass, Pakistan : Evidence from two longitudinal cohort studies 15 years apart

Funding Information: Study 1 was funded through the Applied Diarrheal Disease Research Program at Harvard Institute for International Development with a grant from USAID (Project 936–5952, Cooperative Agreement # DPE-5952-A-00-5073-00), and the Aga Khan Health Service, Northern Areas and Chitral, Pakistan. Study 2 was funded by the Pakistan US S&T Cooperative Agreement between the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC) (No.4–421/PAK-US/HEC/2010/955, grant to the Karakoram International University) and US National Academies of Science (Grant Number PGA-P211012 from NAS to the Fogarty International Center). The funding bodies had no role in the design of the study, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of the manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

EXPLORING THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN CRITICAL THINKING AND ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING SKILLS PURSUING THE BACHELOR DEGREE STUDENTS OF GOVERNMENT COLLEGE UNIVERSITY FAISALABAD

The concept of critical thinking is arduous and complex, its nature is difficult to define and challenging for those students who come from Western or non-native backgrounds, who often encounter difficulties in incorporating a critical aspect into their writing. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to explore the relationship between critical thinking and argumentative writing skills. Through convenient sampling, information from 105 individuals with majors in applied linguistics, international relations, and psychology departments was obtained for this study. To assess participants' writing and critical thinking skills, the study used a critical thinking questionnaire that was developed totally based on the ‘Delphi Consensus statement of Critical Thinking” collectively formulated by a panel of forty six CT experts and an argumentative writing essay for scoring argumentative essays VSTEP rubric (Vietnamese Standardized test of English skill ability,2014)was used. Three stages made up the data gathering process: piloting the questionnaire, disseminating it, and giving the writing exam, which demonstrated high reliability (Cronbach's Alpha=0.87). The study found a weakly positive association between the capacity to write persuasively and critical thinking (multiple R = 0.1188).However, only 1.41% of the variance in writing scores could be assigned to critical thinking (R Square = 0.0141), indicating that critical thinking had a poor ability to predict writing performance. Although critical thinking may influence writing abilities, the ANOVA results did not provide statistical significance for critical thinking as a predictor of writing skills, suggesting that it may not be a strong or reliable predictor in this particular situation