The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Regulatory Comment Letters: Evidence from Iran

Securities commissions regularly review corporate reports, and if the review reveals a possible deficiency— such as a potential accounting error— or requires further clarifications, they send the company a comment letter (CL), including a request for providing written responses and relative additional information. Current study aims to examine whether and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects CLs. This empirical study is based on a sample of 437 Iranian firm year observations from 2011 to 2017. Results show that firms with more CSR are less likely to receive CL, that more CSR does not influence the association of managerial misbehavior and CLs, and that the negative association between CSR and CLs is stronger among firms facing higher environmental information asymmetry and firms having higher corporate governance quality. Collectively, this paper contributes to the literature by providing new evidence on the beneficial effect of CSR in the context of CLs. Las comisiones de valores revisan periódicamente los informes de las empresas, y si la revisión revela una posible deficiencia -como un posible error contable- o se requiere más aclaraciones, envían a la empresa una carta de comentarios (CL), que incluye una solicitud de respuesta por escrito y la relativa información adicional. El presente estudio pretende examinar si la Responsabilidad Social de las Empresas (RSE) afecta a las cartas de comentarios y cómo lo hace. Este estudio empírico se basa en una muestra de 437 observaciones anuales de empresas iraníes desde 2011 hasta 2017. Los resultados muestran que las empresas con más RSC tienen menos probabilidades de recibir CL y que más RSC no influye en la asociación entre mal comportamiento de los directivos y CL. También se pone de manifiesto que la asociación negativa entre RSC y CL es más fuerte entre las empresas que enfrentan una mayor asimetría de información ambiental y las empresas que tienen una mayor calidad de gobierno corporativo. En conjunto, este trabajo contribuye a la literatura aportando nuevas pruebas sobre el efecto beneficioso de la RSC en el contexto de las CL.

Translanguaging in English Language Teaching

This study explores teachers’ perspectives and practices on translanguaging in English language teaching. Especially, it focuses on how English language teachers perceive and explicate the meaning of translanguaging. The researcher got the primary data from the teachers in different private and public schools in Chitwan. All the respondents were studying in the 4th year of B.Ed major English at Birendra M. Campus Bharatpur; they all were teachers as well. First of all, some survey questions which were related to the study were sent to them via mail and got the written responses by the same means. It happened in such a way because of the lockdown due to the COVID-19. To understand the issue further, I arranged the interview and focus group discussion. I followed the standard process of analysis i.e., coding, categorizing, thematizing, and discussion. Respondents were aware of translanguaging and they took it positively. They agreed that bringing the native languages of every student to classrooms was challenging. They claimed that translanguaging enhances students’ creativity and participation in class.

Connecting Spatial Reasoning Process to Geometric Problem

The field of spatial reasoning has seen a lot of research. The process of spatial reasoning, on the other hand, needs to be investigated further. The goal of this study is to capture an elementary school student's spatial reasoning process when solving geometric problems. The spatial skills used in solving geometric problems were also identified in this study. A geometric test was given to seventeen elementary school students. Three participants were chosen as the study's subjects based on their written responses. According to the findings, the subject's spatial reasoning process always begins with the processing of information in mental visualization. Mental visualization is used to help with orientation and selecting the appropriate visual perspective. The spatial skills of spatial visualization and spatial orientation are critical in spatial reasoning. Furthermore, this research initiated the emphasis on the focus of spatial reasoning in the process.

Writing on Death: Plague Narratives. A Review Essay

This essay discusses several books, ancient and recent, on plagues to ask the question: Can we face death without turning away from it through historical narration? Can we write about death, which only afflicts individuals, without stripping death of its individuality? After briefly addressing these questions, I discuss five books, one from the ancient period (Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War), one from the late medieval period (Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron), one from the early modern period (Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and two from the modern period (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society). These books not only come from different eras but also reflect different written responses to death—ancient history, story/fable, reportage, futuristic novel, and contemporary history. The essay concludes by considering a counterargument to its focus on death, an argument developed by Baruch Spinoza which claims that humans should think nothing less than of death.

Investigating the relationship between linguistic changes in L2 writers’ paraphrasing, paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency

While the typology of paraphrasing revolves around linguistic changes of paraphrasing, little is known about the importance of different types of linguistic changes and their relationship between paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Empirical enquiry has focused on L2 writers’ inappropriate paraphrasing performance against the norm of L1 writer, which is problematic in that L2 and L1 writers displayed considerable variation in paraphrasing. The present study drew upon 202 Chinese EFL writers’ written responses in a paraphrasing test to look into the discrete linguistic transformations in paraphrasing and examine how the frequency of different linguistic changes in paraphrasing relates to their paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Correlation analysis was run to analyze the relationship between the frequency of linguistic changes and paraphrasing performance. Multivariate analysis of variance analysis was conducted to examine how the frequency of linguistic changes relates to L2 proficiency. The findings revealed that Conceptual Transformation had the highest significant correlation with paraphrasing scores, followed by Lexical Transformation and then Syntactic Transformation. The frequency of Synonym Substitution, Morphology, Multiple Word Units, Phrase/Clause Shift, Active/Passive Shift and Conceptual Transformation increased as L2 writers’ proficiency levels increased. Implications are drawn from the findings for paraphrasing instruction and assessment, research in paraphrasing and L2 writers’ academic writing practice.

DECODING VIEWS AND SENTIMENTS OF PROGRAM HEADS TOWARDS THE SUPERVISION OF INSTRUCTION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The purpose of this study was to decode the hidden views and sentiments from the collated written responses of Eastern Samar State University’s Program Heads regarding supervision of instructions amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This study utilized Exploratory Sequential Mixed Method to explore and understand the perspective or sentiments of Eastern Samar State University program heads towards supervision of instruction in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected/collated from the participants indirectly using an interview questionnaire containing an open-ended question. The same were processed and analyzed using an open-source machine learning software called Orange toolbox (Demsar et al., 2013) wherein pre-processing, sentiment analysis and topic modelling built-in tools were utilized. The results showed that the most prominent words generated by the machine learning tool from the text file of responses are the words pandemic, performance, program, learning, difficult, supervision, instruction, internet, faculty, online students, teaching, delivery confusing, challenging, poor and connectivity. The dominant sentiment associated thereof lean towards negative polarity which implicate negative sentiments. Hidden topics were automatically generated by the machine which allowed the researchers to come up with the following related themes: “Impact of pandemic in the supervision of instruction of faculty and learning of students”, “Challenges in the delivery of instruction and supervision due to poor internet connectivity”, and “Strategic role of online modalities and connectivity in supervision and delivery of instruction”. There are limited researches navigating in text mining and sentiment analysis with the use of Orange toolbox particularly those that deals with supervision of instruction in a Philippine State University. There are related studies using machine learning software, but nothing like this study directed towards a specific gap in specific locale. KEYWORDS: Pandemic, Latent Semantic Indexing, Orange Toolbox, Sentiment Analysis, Thematic Analysis.

Understanding Pandemics Such as COVID-19 through the Lenses of the “One Health” Approach

This study aims to contribute to research on systemic thinking in biology education, particularly how to best equip pre-service teachers to introduce health problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic using the “One Health” approach. We attempt to explore to what extent a group of pre-service teachers identify our lifestyle and relationships with nature as factors that contribute to the emergence of future pandemics. The research questions are as follows: (1) What dimensions of the One Health approach did the students identify as potential causes that can produce and prevent future pandemics such as the COVID-19 disease? (2) To what extent did the students show a systemic view aligned to the One Health approach? The participants were 43 pre-service elementary teachers working on a set of activities about the COVID-19 pandemic, in which they were asked about the potential causes of and ways to prevent future pandemics. Content analysis of individual written responses is applied for addressing the research questions, focusing on the dimensions of the One Health approach and the level of system thinking reflected. Most participants focused on the human dimension and a few mentioned environmental and animal dimensions, which points to the need to integrate the One Health notion into teacher training.

Primary school pre-service teachers’ solutions to pattern problem-solving tasks based on three components of creativity

Education stakeholders and researchers in South Africa have emphasised the need to enhance teachers’ creativity through problem-solving tasks. Teachers’ creativity entails using new ideas of creative devices to solve problems, implement solutions, and make learning more effective. In the research reported on here, Guilford’s theory was used to explore primary school pre-service teachers’ solutions to pattern problem-solving tasks based on 3 components of creativity. The data for this research were produced from primary school pre-service teachers’ written responses to the pattern problem-solving tasks, and an extract from participants’ semi-structured interviews. The research involved a qualitative design using convenient purposive sampling to sample 62 pre-service teachers enrolled for a primary mathematics module at a selected higher education institution. Participants’ responses to the written tasks were analysed using content analysis, while the semi-structured interviews were analysed thematically. The result shows that 35 participants were able to draw patterns and express patterns in nth form, while 27 failed to do so. The most common method used to draw a new pattern was counting in 2s and 4s. Furthermore, the result shows that half of the pre-service teachers who participated in the study were not capable of producing varied solutions to pattern tasks. An indication that they did not have the creative potential to prepare learners even after they had been exposed to advanced mathematics content as part of their training process. We recommend that pre service teacher education programmes should include academic activities that could help pre-service teachers enhance creativity through tasks with divergent thinking.

Faith and FACES: Black Parents’ Perceptions of Autism, Faith, and Coping

Faith, spirituality, and religious involvement can promote stress-related coping for parents raising children with autism, yet little research has explored religious coping in Black parents raising children with autism. Given the high levels of religiosity and increased incidence of autism in Black families, the purpose of this qualitative study was to highlight perceptions of Black parents raising children with autism on mental health and religious coping within the context of a parent advocacy intervention efficacy study. We used a grounded theory method with structural coding of group session transcripts and written responses to center the voices of seven Black parents raising children with autism. Three significant findings emerged: (a) mental health conceptualization; (b) double disenfranchisement; and (c) communal coping.