Self-Assessed Gap of Acquired and Desired Assessment Skills of Prospective Teachers

The difference between the skills desired to carry out assessments tasks and the skills actually acquired during pre-service teaching training program by prospective teachers is being referred to as skills’ gap. The study draws its basis from 5thnational professional standards for teachers, which describes necessary assessment skills for teachers. This study intends to find out the assessment skills of prospective teachers. The assessment skills consisting of 39 items and three subscales were used to collect data from 333 prospective teachers selected from four public sector universities of central Punjab. The majority of the prospective teachers acquired a moderate level of assessment skills (Mean= 4.37, SD = 0.96). The average desired level of assessment skills (Mean= 5.45, SD = 0.91) was higher than the acquired level majority of the prospective teachers acquired a moderate level of assessment skills. Positive relationship between acquired and desired level of assessment skills leads to the conclusion that the prospective teachers who desire higher level of assessment skills achieve comparatively higher level and vice versa. Gender differences were found in existing and desired self-assessed assessment skills, knowledge of assessment, dispositions towards assessment and skills of assessment in the favour of female’ prospective teachers. The study may contribute to improve the achieved level of assessment skills by sensitizing the prospective teachers and teacher educators about the significance of desired level of assessment skills in improving the acquired level

Evaluating Usages of Social Media and Educational Teaching Methods in Consonance with the Teachings of Islam

Social media plays a very important role in the present education system of the world on the whole and in Islamic Republic of Pakistan in special. People in this area prefer to find information on social sites rather than find them face to face. Social media sites provide a variety of mediums for interacting and communicating while learning. However, this widespread use of social media is misused by some of the less responsible. The use of social media that is not Islamic values ​​can be harmful to society. Integrity in the dissemination of information on social media has been an issue often overlooked by some writers. Therefore, the application of Islamic values ​​is important in preventing these problems from continuing to spread and producing less educated communities. Based on the analysis of the study, there are four topics that cover teaching methods through social media from an Islamic perspective. Firstly think of social media as a medium of teaching. Subsequently, this article addresses the issue of using social media as a medium of instruction. The application of Islamic values ​​in communicating information through social media is also elaborated. Finally, this article also discusses the importance and benefits of emphasizing Islamic values ​​in communicating information on social media

Resilience And Academic Achievement Of Male And Female Secondary Level Students In Pakistan

Resilience is the ability to succeed despite barriers that make it difficult for the students to succeed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between resilience and academic achievement of secondary level students of Gujranwala, Pakistan. A Resilience scale was used to collect data. The sample consisted of 127 secondary students, including 52 boys and 75 girls. The data revealed that there was no association between resilience and achievement as measured through marks obtained in 10th grade. The boys are more resilient than girls at the secondary level in Pakistan. &nbsp

Decision Making Practices In Universities Of Pakistan

Decision making can be regarded as an outcome of mental processes (cognitive process) leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion. The purpose of this descriptive survey was to explore the Decision making practices in administrative and academic matters in the universities of Pakistan. A sample of nineteen universities was selected by applying stratified random sampling technique.  The respondents, i-e members of university bodies; teachers and administrative officers were selected randomly. Three questionnaires constructed on Likert’s five-point scale were used for data collection. Data was tabulated and analyzed by using the F-ratio and Chi-square. The survey results revealed that overall decision-making practices in the universities were found unsatisfactory and, most of the decisions were made without application of management decision-making techniques

MaintainoMATE: A GitHub App for Intelligent Automation of Maintenance Activities

Software development projects rely on issue tracking systems at the core of tracking maintenance tasks such as bug reports, and enhancement requests. Incoming issue-reports on these issue tracking systems must be managed in an effective manner. First, they must be labelled and then assigned to a particular developer with relevant expertise. This handling of issue-reports is critical and requires thorough scanning of the text entered in an issue-report making it a labor-intensive task. In this paper, we present a unified framework called MaintainoMATE, which is capable of automatically categorizing the issue-reports in their respective category and further assigning the issue-reports to a developer with relevant expertise. We use the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), as an underlying model for MaintainoMATE to learn the contextual information for automatic issue-report labeling and assignment tasks. We deploy the framework used in this work as a GitHub application. We empirically evaluate our approach on GitHub issue-reports to show its capability of assigning labels to the issue-reports. We were able to achieve an F1-score close to 80\%, which is comparable to existing state-of-the-art results. Similarly, our initial evaluations show that we can assign relevant developers to the issue-reports with an F1 score of 54\%, which is a significant improvement over existing approaches. Our initial findings suggest that MaintainoMATE has the potential of improving software quality and reducing maintenance costs by accurately automating activities involved in the maintenance processes. Our future work would be directed towards improving the issue-assignment module

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CORPORATE TAX AND PRIVATE INVESTMENT IN PAKISTAN: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Investment plays a pivotal role in promoting growth andbringing prosperity countries. However higher Corporate Tax rates are considered to be one of the main hurdles in the way of Investment.Keeping in view this fact, the present study has been an effort toempirically explore this contrivance for Pakistan. The Study usedtime series data for the time period 1984-2014 by applying AutoRegressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique for econometricsanalysis. Results show that higher corporate tax rate has mitigated private investment in Pakistan. High tax rate for corporate sector increases the cost and reduces the corporate profits; hence it decreases private investment. The present study recommends that corporate tax rate should be decreased to enhance private investment in Pakistan

An Adaptive Software Fault Tolerant Framework for Ubiquitous Vehicular Technologies

Probability for the occurrence of faults increases manifolds when program Lines of Code (LoC) exceeds a few thousand in ubiquitous applications. Faults mitigation in ubiquitous applications, such as those of autonomous Vehicular Technologies (VTs), has not been effective even with the use of formal methods. Faults in such applications require exhaustive testing for a timely fix, that seems infeasible computationally. This emphasizes the imperative role of Software Fault Tolerance (SFT) for autonomous applications. Several SFT techniques have been proposed but failures revealed in VT applications imply that existing SFT techniques need to be fine-tuned. In this paper, current replication-based SFT techniques have been analyzed and classified with respect to their diversity, adjudication, and adaptivity. Essential parameters (such as Reliability, Time, Variance, etc) for adjudication, diversity, and adaptiveness were recorded. The identified parameters were mapped to different techniques (such as AFTRC, SCOP, VFT, etc) for observing their shortcomings. Consequently, a generic framework named ”Diverse Parallel Adjudication for Software Fault Tolerance (DPA-SFT)” has been proposed. DPA-SFT addresses the shortcomings of existing SFT techniques for VTs with the added value of parallel and diverse adjudication. A prototype implementation of the proposed framework has been developed for assessing the viability of DPA-SFT over modules of VT. An empirical comparison of the proposed framework was performed with prevalent techniques (AFTRC, SCOP, VFT, etc). A thorough evaluation suggests that DPA-SFT performs better than contemporary SFT techniques in VTs due to its parallel and diverse adjudication

Outcome of Endoscopic Third Ventriculostomy

Background: To study the outcome of endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV)Methods: In this observational study an endoscopic third ventriculostomy was applied in patients who suffered from hydrocephaly. The diagnosis of hydrocephalus was determined by  physical, neurological and neuro-radiological criteria. Patients with obstructed hydrocephalus whether congenital or acquired, with a dilated 3rd ventricle were included. Linear incision was given 2cm anterior to the coronal suture in mid pupillary line. Right frontal burr hole is made. For ETV, burr hole is placed on a line joining the foramen of monro and inter-peduncular line. Floor of the thirdventricle was punctured close to or over the dorsum sellae. Membrane was dilated with balloon. Balloon was inflated and subsequently was taken out from puncture site. It ensured easy visibility of basilar artery and its perforators.Result: Age of patients ranged from 06 months to 24 years, with a mean age of 4 years . Fourteen patients had posterior fossa tumour’s with dilated third ventricle, sixty four patients had aqua ductal stenosis, two patients with CSF ascites as complication of ventriculo-peritoneal shunt, eleven patients had blocked lower end of ventriculoperitoneal shunt. Seven patients had CSF leak. Time taken to complete endoscopic third ventriculostomy was from 20 to 40 min as compared to 1 hour to 1.30 hours, taken in a VP shunt. Patients who had ETV performed had a mean hospital stay of 3 days, where as patients in whom a VP shunt was performed stayed in the ward for an average of 5 to 10 days, depending on how eventful the post op period was. The cost incurred to the VP shunt patient who remained admitted for an average of 5 days was between Rupees 16,000 to 25,000, ascompared to Rs: 2000 for the patient who underwent endoscopic third ventriculostomy.Conclusion: Patients of ETV, with less per operative time, had decreased length of stay. ETV also was less expensive to the patient and he did not have to buy the shunt apparatus with less rehospitalization rates, compared to patients who had undergone shunt