The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between critical thinking, epistemological beliefs, and learning strategies with the academic performance of high school first-grade male and female students in Yazd. For this purpose, from among all first-grade students, as many as 250 students (130 females and 120 males) were selected by using multistage cluster sampling. The data needed were then collected through using California Critical Thinking Skills Test, Schommer's Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire, Biggs’ Revised Two Factor Study Process Questionnaire. The findings indicated that there is a positive significant relationship between critical thinking and academic performance and achievement. Moreover, four factors of epistemological beliefs include knowledge structure, knowledge stability, learning ability, and learning speed; these four factors have a positive significant relationship with the students’ academic performance. The other variable of the present study is learning strategies including deep and surface strategies. The findings of the present study indicated that there is a positive significant relationship between deep learning strategy and academic achievement. However, no significant relationship was observed between surface learning strategy and academic performance. Furthermore, the findings obtained from the multiple regression analysis indicated that except for the surface learning strategy, all other predictor variables (i.e. critical thinking, structure, stability, ability, speed, and deep learning strategy) explained and predicted the academic performance. To sum up, it can be claimed that critical thinking, epistemological beliefs, and deep learning strategy affect the students’ academic progress and achievement.
An infant incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a medical instrument of care that provides oxygen, warmth and moisture to a newborn baby. Due to environmental conditions affecting the infants foster babies may experience discomfort and pain at some point. Thus, this study aimed to assess ambient air quality in neonatal incubators to improve the environmental quality of neonatal intensive care units and safety. Air pollutants concentrations consisting of particulate matter (pm2.5, pm10), hydrocarbons (HOCH), volatile organic compounds (VOC), air quality index (AQI), humidity and temperature, were measured at four selected Baghdad hospitals (Al-Karkh and Rusafa) . The results showed that the
... Show More
(1)
In this research, the effect of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) on the alumina/chromia (Al2O3/Cr2O3) nanocomposites has been investigated. Al2O3/Cr2O3-MWCNTs nanocomposites with variable contents of Cr2O3 and MWCNTs were fabricated using coprecipitation process and followed by spark plasma sintering. XRD analysis revealed a good crystallinity of sintered nanocomposites samples and there was only one phase presence of Al2O3-Cr2O3 solid solution. Density, Vickers microhardness, fracture toughness and fracture strength have been measured in the sintered samples. The results show tha
... Show More
(1)
Abstract
Friction stir welding is a relatively new joining process, which involves the joining of metals without fusion or filler materials. In this study, the effect of welding parameters on the mechanical properties of aluminum alloys AA2024-T351 joints produced by FSW was investigated.
Different ranges of welding parameters, as input factors, such as welding speed (6 - 34 mm/min) and rotational speed (725 - 1235 rpm) were used to obtain their influences on the main responses, in terms of elongation, tensile strength, and maximum bending force. Experimental measurements of main responses were taken and analyzed using DESIGN EXPERT 8 experimental design software which was used to develop t
... Show MoreThe various properties of the ground and excited electronic states of coumarins 102 using density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) was calculated by the B3LYP density functional model with 6-31G(d,p) basis set by Gaussian 09 W program. Spectral characteristics of coumarin102 have been probed into by methods of experimental UV-visible, and quantum chemistry. The UV spectrum was measured in methanol. The optimized structures, total energies, electronic states (HOMO- LUMO), energy gap, ionization potentials, electron affinities, chemical potential, global hardness, softness, global electrophilictity, and dipole moment were measured. We find good agreement between experimental data of UV spectrum and
... Show More
(2)
The Wheat husk is one of the common wastes abundantly available in the Middle East countries especially in Iraq. The present study aimed to evaluate the Wheat husk as low cost material, eco-friendly adsorbents for the removal of the carcinogenic dye (Congo red dye) from wastewater by investigate the effect of, at different conditions such as, pH(3-10), amount of adsorbents (1-2.3gm/L),and particle size (125-1000) μm, initial Congo red dye concentration(10, 25 , 50 and 75mg/l) by batch experiments. The results showed that the removal percentage of dye increased with increasing adsorbent dosage, and decreasing particle size. The maximum removal and uptake reached (91%) , 21.5mg/g, respectively for 25 initial concent
... Show More
(2)
Let R be associative ring with identity and M is a non- zero unitary left module over R. M is called M- hollow if every maximal submodule of M is small submodule of M. In this paper we study the properties of this kind of modules.
This paper presents a meta-heuristic swarm based optimization technique for solving robot path planning. The natural activities of actual ants inspire which named Ant Colony Optimization. (ACO) has been proposed in this work to find the shortest and safest path for a mobile robot in different static environments with different complexities. A nonzero size for the mobile robot has been considered in the project by taking a tolerance around the obstacle to account for the actual size of the mobile robot. A new concept was added to standard Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for further modifications. Simulations results, which carried out using MATLAB 2015(a) environment, prove that the suggested algorithm outperforms the standard version of AC
... Show More
(18)
In this study the isomerization of desulfuerized light Iraqi petroleum naphtha (Al-Dura Refinery) with boiling point range of 37 to 124 °C , 80.5 API specific gravity and 68.2 octane number has been investigated. Two types of catalysts were prepared (Pt/HX and Pt/SrX) by impregnation of 0.8 wt% Pt on l 3X-zeolite. The catalyst activity and selectivity toward isomerization, and catalyst deactivation were investigated.
The isomerization unit consisted of a vertical tubular stainless steel reactor of 2 cm internal diameter, 3 cm external diameter and 68 cm height. The operating pressure was atmospheric for all experimental runs. The liquid flow of lightnaphtha was 0.4 Uh, and the catalyst weight was 50 gm, H/
... Show MoreIn this paper, integrated quantum neural network (QNN), which is a class of feedforward
neural networks (FFNN’s), is performed through emerging quantum computing (QC) with artificial neural network(ANN) classifier. It is used in data classification technique, and here iris flower data is used as a classification signals. For this purpose independent component analysis (ICA) is used as a feature extraction technique after normalization of these signals, the architecture of (QNN’s) has inherently built in fuzzy, hidden units of these networks (QNN’s) to develop quantized representations of sample information provided by the training data set in various graded levels of certainty. Experimental results presented here show that
... Show More