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The present study aims to investigate the effects of a number of demographic and academic factors, such as gender, age, nationality (Emirati vs non-Emirati), high school major (arts vs science) and high school score, on the academic performance – measured by overall grade point average – of undergraduate students majoring in statistics at United Arab Emirates University.

This study includes 188 undergraduate statistics students (142 female and 46 male) for the academic years 2012-2013 to 2015-2016. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the collected data.

The results indicate that gender, age and nationality have no significant impacts on the academic performance of undergraduate students in statistics bachelor’s degree program, while high school major and high school score do.

This study had several limitations. First, only students of one university were included in this study, which would have limited the generalizability of the results. Second, the study focused on the impact of a limited number of factors on academic performance of undergraduate statistics students. But, the study has a number of implications for students, educators and university policy-makers.

The present study is the first attempt to explore the factors that might affect the academic performance of undergraduate students in statistics bachelor’s degree program in an Arabic setting.

This research examines how the cost performance of defense contracts varies among the Air Force, Army, Navy, and the Department of Defense (DoD) and among five major defense contractors: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Data for these analyses was extracted from the recently established Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval (DAMIR) web-based interface for management information on Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAP). Note that, in addition to the three military services, MDAP data is also reported for DoD itself.

Data analysis indicates that the Navy ranks last among the military services and DoD in cost performance for MDAP contracts, while the Air Force ranks best. Of the defense contractors, Raytheon ranks last in cost performance and General Dynamics is next to last. Furthermore, the Navy contracts more frequently with Raytheon and General Dynamics than do the other services or DoD. Explanatory factors for poor cost performance may be due to factors such as the Navy's lack of oversight, the quality of the acquisition workforce, the defense contractors’ cost inefficiency, ethical lapses, or weak corporate governance, or combinations of these factors.

In addition, the schedule performance data was also identified. Tests of statistical significance on the schedule performance difference generally yield no results except for one relationship which indicates that the Navy is more likely to have Acquisition Program Baseline (APB) schedule breaches than its counterparts. Finally, cost performance data is examined for statistically significant differences between the two major categories of defense contracts: fixed-price contracts and cost-plus contracts. However, no significant findings were discovered.

According to an old saying, the best library in the world is one that is empty, for all its books have been borrowed. But modern libraries are bursting with books and other resources and their burgeoning collections defy conventional stock‐taking. The unprecedented growth of knowledge in contemporary times has created complex problems and new challenges, not the least important of which is collection evaluation. This essay describes one way to meet this increasingly important problem by taking a new approach and creating a new model.

This study aims to analyze the wage differentials of the majors in college education in Turkey, which is a country implementing an ongoing expansion in college education in recent years.

The study implements Mincreian wage regression using ordinary least squares, Heckman two-step estimation and quantile regression with sample selection correction by using household labor force surveys of TurkStat from the years 2014–2017.

The findings indicate one of the highest heterogeneity, close to 0.50 log points, between majors in the literature. The within-heterogeneity created by majors is highest among the graduates of social-behavioral sciences, law, biology, physics, mathematics, statistics, computer, engineering and manufacturing, as shown by a 90–10 difference, which is almost 700% for some of these majors. This study shows that the natural science and technical majors that are expected to be more productive and to be paid more fall behind in the wage distribution.

Estimation results show that natural science majors, except for subjects allied to medicine and engineering, are paid lower than law and service-sector-related majors. This indicates that the predictions of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis are not valid in the wage profiles in Turkey and that some majors supply more than the sectoral needs. This casts doubts on the effectiveness of the ongoing higher education expansion process of the country.

This study contributes to the literature on wage differentials of college majors, an area with limited studies. This is the first study analyzing wage differentials of the field of studies by correcting sample selection bias for the Turkish case.

The Bryant University Mathematics Department has been collecting math placement scores and admissions data for all incoming freshmen for many years. In the past, the authors have used these data mainly for placement in first-year classes and more recently to invite the most mathematically talented students to become mathematics majors. The purpose of this paper is to use the same data source to predict persistence in declared majors for all incoming students.

In order to categorize the students, the authors use cluster analysis, one of the tools of data mining, to see if students in particular majors share similar strengths based on the available data. The authors follow up this analysis by running a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to confirm that the means of the clusters are significantly different.

The cluster analysis resulted in five distinct clusters, which were confirmed by the results of the MANOVA. The authors also found how many students in each cluster persisted in their chosen major.

These results will help to improve counseling and proper placement of incoming freshmen. They will also be helpful in long-range planning of upper-level courses. Retention of students in their majors is an important concern for colleges and universities as it relates to planning issues, such as scheduling classes, particularly for upper classmen. This could also affect departmental requirements, such as the size of the faculty.

This work aims to examine the access and disparity of institutional agricultural credit for small and marginal farmers across various social groups from three Indian states.

Field data on socio economic variables were collected using multi-stage stratified random sampling and purposive sampling through a structured questionnaire by interviewing about 400 cross sectional small and marginal farmers belonging to various social groups such as general caste, other backward caste, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Disparity of agricultural credit across different social groups is assessed using measures such as credit access, credit adequacy ratio, credit gap and newly constructed Agriculture Credit Disparity Index (ACDI).

The credit access, credit access ratio and newly constructed ACDI suggest that, by and large, farmers belonging to socially advantaged groups have better access to institutional agricultural assistance than farmers belonging to socially disadvantaged groups.

The agricultural credit policy of the government needs to incorporate measures to eliminate credit disparity primarily by correcting the poor socio-economic profile (especially lower asset ownership and higher illiteracy) of socially disadvantaged farmers compared to the farmers' counterparts.

This study contributes to the existing work by providing fresh evidence from the field across social groups for both kharif and rabi crops using recent survey data from small and marginal farmers which have important policy implications.

The purpose of this paper is attracting attention to the use of information by mosque speechmakers (MSs) in the Islamic and Arabic world, specifically in Upper Egypt.

This study used a survey, which was conducted from September to November 2019. A structured questionnaire was designed in Arabic and distributed to the mosques that were chosen as a sample to represent all the mosques of Upper Egypt. The researcher sampled 5% (n = 421) of the total of 8,421 mosques in Upper Egypt.

The findings showed the majority of the MSs in Upper Egypt are to be older (from 36 to 60 years, educated [mostly with BA degrees]), married and with an average monthly income over LE 3,500. Almost all MSs were strongly looking for information to make specific/general research, to make a religious lecture and be aware of contemporary events. The most frequently used sources of information by MSs were biographies, books, mass media, references and the Web. Most of the MSs had been using information heavily. The highest percentage of them spent from 7 to 12 h a week searching for information. MSs preferred the use of printed sources of information to those non-print sources. Mobile apps, followed by the Web and information databases were the most significant technological tools used by MSs. MSs’ efficiency level of using English was good and a reasonable number of them indicated that they were not good at speaking other languages, such as French. The home/personal library and the special library were the most important types of libraries used by MSs. The unaffected role of the library to access information, followed by the use of foreign languages to access some sources of information, as well as the use of technology, were the most significant problems faced by MSs when searching for information.

This paper investigates the topic of MSs’ use of and access to information. This topic, unfortunately, has limited previous research, particularly in the Arabic and Islamic environment.

This paper provides valuable insight into the information behavior of a very significant client group, namely, MSs.

Being one of the very few studies conducted on these beneficiaries of information in the Arab and Islamic environment, this study is considered a unique one among several studies conducted in the area of the information-seeking behavior, especially with such a significant group of information users/seekers in such influencing environment in the world. The findings of this study may help in a better understanding of the information-seeking behavior of the MSs.

Although there are many studies addressing the learning styles of business students as well as students of other disciplines, there are few studies which address the learning style preferences of statistics students. The purpose of this study is to explore the learning style preferences of statistics students at a United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). Furthermore, it investigates whether there are statistically significant differences along the four dimensions of learning styles due to students’ demographic and academic characteristics.

Questionnaires were distributed to the whole population which included 79 undergraduate statistics students at the UAEU, of which 69 returned the questionnaire. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies and percentages were used to present the main characteristics of respondents and the results of the study. Additionally, a chi-square test was used to find out if there were significant differences along the four dimensions of learning style preferences due to students’ demographic and academic characteristics.

The results indicate that UAEU undergraduate statistics students have balanced preferences along the four dimensions of learning styles. Results also suggest that there are no statistically significant differences along the four dimensions of learning styles due to students’ demographic and academic characteristics, except in the active-reflective and sensing-intuitive dimensions with respect to high school type (private vs public).

There are a number of limitations associated with this study. First, the findings of the study are based on data from only one university. Second, the sample was small and limited to undergraduate statistics students and, therefore, it excluded graduate students who might have had different experiences. Third, the results are based on a self-reported questionnaire and this, in turn, might have affected the reliability of the results On the other hand, it has a number of implications for educators and students. Educators will benefit from the results of this study in the sense that they will adopt teaching styles and strategies that match learning styles of the majority of their students. Students themselves will benefit from knowing their own learning style.

The present study is the first attempt to explore learning styles preference of undergraduate students not only in the UAE setting but also in the developing country setting.

The primary purpose of this study is to assess the factors that influence households’ choice of cooking fuel in Bauchi State, Nigeria.

In total, 750 samples were selected using multistage area cluster sampling, of which 539 responses were analysed. Multinomial logit model was used to estimate the factors that determine a household’s main cooking fuel choice in Bauchi State, Nigeria.

The result has shown that income, location, price of firewood, hours of electricity supply and home ownership are among the factors that have a significant impact on influencing the type of cooking fuel to be adopted by households.

The study cannot offer any explanation about the influence of time dimension on the pattern of household cooking fuel choice in the study area.

Implementation of policies to increase the income of households, ensuring the availability of clean cooking fuel source and the increase in the price of firewood will encourage households to switch from using firewood to using cleaner fuel sources such as kerosene, electricity and gas.

This study has contributed to the existing literature on household energy choice by conducting a micro-level analysis of households’ cooking fuel choice in Bauchi State where a similar study has not been conducted. The study developed approximately 13 hypotheses (out of which two were found to be irrelevant) and added one new variable to test the impact of the neighbourhood’s source of cooking fuel on households’ cooking fuel choice.