A study of materiality auditing: case study from Libya

The results demonstrate strong agreement between Libyan auditors about the materiality concept. In terms of the international auditing standards, not all Libyan auditors follow these standards. The percentage of the item being audited is the most important quantitative form, followed by the item’s position in the financial statements and the absolute value. The results also identified 16 qualitative factors for materiality auditing decisions.

The development of internal auditing in Ethiopia: the role of institutional norms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which institutional norms determine attributes of internal audit practices and how institutional changes explain the development of these practices.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors employed a qualitative research approach based on archival analysis and interview evidence.

Findings – Findings indicate that regulation-based institutional norms explain the adoption of internal audit and the function's characteristics in Ethiopian organizations. Furthermore, innovative introduction of internal audit practices originate within individual organizations and eventually get institutionalized through diffusion. Such innovations are associated with organizational size, top management characteristics, internal audit advancement in technology, and exogenous input from the external environment. Widely accepted internal audit practices, as institutional norms, are not always taken-for-granted at the level of individual organizations. The institutional change perspective enables explaining how new internal audit approaches are introduced to supplant old ones.

Originality/value – This study theorizes the development of internal audit practices from an institutional change perspective. Being the first study to do so, it contributes to the understanding of key drivers of institutional change that initiate new institutional norms that foster the development of internal audit through introduction and diffusion of new audit practices as old ones are deinstitutionalized.

Comparing the strength of auditing and reporting standards and investigating their predictors in Europe and Asia

The World Economic Forum conducted an opinion survey to determine the strength of auditing and reporting standards (SARS) in 133 countries. It then assigned a score for SARS to each country as one of its global competitive indices. This is a unique dataset on SARS at country level. Using this dataset, this paper compares SARS scores for 72 countries (41 European and 31 Asian). A multi-phase regression analysis is employed to empirically investigate the predictors of SARS using five sub-models. Findings from the study support existing theory and add new findings to the auditing and reporting literature at a regional level. It suggests that there are nine predictors of SARS which are similar for both Europe and Asia but with different magnitude. In Asia the efficiency of the legal framework and the size of the foreign export market are also significant predictors of SARS compared to Europe.

Verifiable auditing for outsourced database in cloud computing

The notion of database outsourcing enables the data owner to delegate the database management to a cloud service provider (CSP) that provides various database services to different users. Recently, plenty of research work has been done on the primitive of outsourced database. However, it seems that no existing solutions can perfectly support the properties of both correctness and completeness for the query results, especially in the case when the dishonest CSP intentionally returns an empty set for the query request of the user. In this paper, we propose a new verifiable auditing scheme for outsourced database, which can simultaneously achieve the correctness and completeness of search results even if the dishonest CSP purposely returns an empty set. Furthermore, we can prove that our construction can achieve the desired security properties even in the encrypted outsourced database. Besides, the proposed scheme can be extended to support the dynamic database setting by incorporating the notion of verifiable database with updates.

Reading comprehension in primary school: textbooks, curriculum and assessment

This study describes the reading comprehension processes present in the most widely sold textbooks at the fourth grade level in Portugal and discusses how they compare to international assessments of reading literacy. We adopted the Progress of International Reading Literacy Study framework to categorize the questions in the textbooks. Our analyses revealed that they focus heavily on the retrieval of explicitly stated information to the detriment of higher level comprehension skills. Portuguese fourth grade textbooks rarely challenge students to make connections between their knowledge and the ideas in the texts and to adopt a critical and evaluative reading stance. This is in sharp contrast to what students are asked to do in the Progress of International Reading Literacy Study, conducted every five years since 2001, and it may help explain the poor results Portuguese students have in national assessment and in PISA. The findings are discussed in light of the curriculum frameworks currently adopted in Portugal and suggestions are made as to how we can improve reading literacy achievement.

The Didactic Transposition of the Photoelectric Effect in High School Brazilian Physics Textbooks

É notório que o livro didático desempenha um papel fundamental na prática pedagógica da maioria dos professores de Física constituindo importante fonte de referência para professores e estudantes. Ao mesmo tempo representa a memória impressa das demandas e paradigmas de ensino, e procura atender às exigências prescritas na legislação e diretrizes, de uma determinada localidade e período. Atualmente, a inserção de Física Moderna e Contemporânea no currículo do Ensino Médio brasileiro está entre as prioridades, preconizando, entre. outros, o ensino do efeito fotoelétrico, em função da relevância do fenômeno ao corroborar a interpretação corpuscular da natureza da luz, e o consequente laureio de Albert Einstein com o Prêmio Nobel. Estudos realizados apontam que muitos dos livros didáticos apresentam a história do efeito fotoelétrico de maneira superficial ou errônea, e expõem incorretamente a função trabalho e o conceito de fóton (Klassen, 2011). Tendo em vista o exposto, objetivamos analisar como ocorre a apresentação do efeito fotoelétrico especificamente em dez coleções didáticas brasileiras aprovadas pelo Programa Nacional do Livro Didático do Ensino Médio 2012 do governo federal, tendo como aporte teórico as considerações de Yves Chevallard (Brockington e Pietrocola, 2005). Procuramos resposta para a seguinte pergunta: Quais são as transposições ocorridas na apresentação do efeito fotoelétrico (saber sábio) para se tornar o saber a ensinar em materiais escolares? Nossa análise centrou-se no processo de descontextualização, entendido como o processo pelo qual o saber sábio passa para que seja ensinável, sendo necessário que seja arrancado de seu contexto original, ou seja, o seu processo histórico.

INVESTIGATING THE PRESENCE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN UNIVERSITY GENERAL CHEMISTRY TEXTBOOKS

INVESTIGATING THE PRESENCE OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN UNIVERSITY GENERAL CHEMISTRY TEXTBOOKS. This paper aims at analyzing the history of science content of three general chemistry textbooks used in Brazilian universities: the translations of Kotz and Treichel's Chemistry & Chemical Reactivity, Atkins and Jones's Chemical Principles, and Garritz and Chamizo's Quimica. Results revealed different trends for the inclusion of history of science in chemistry teaching. Katz & Treichel and Atkins & Jones used history mainly as curiosity and ornament. Garritz & Chamizo adopted the historical approach as one of the organizing axis of their textbook. Nevertheless, the historical content of the three textbooks may be criticized from current historiographical standpoint.

Chemistry and Chemical Education Through Text and Image: Analysis of Twentieth Century Textbooks Used in Brazilian Context

Assuming that textbooks give literary expression to cultural and ideological values of a nation or group, we propose the analysis of chemistry textbooks used in Brazilian universities throughout the twentieth century. We analyzed iconographic and textual aspects of 31 textbooks which had significant diffusion in the context of Brazilian universities at that period. As a result of the iconographic analysis, nine categories of images were proposed: (1) laboratory and experimentation, (2) industry and production, (3) graphs and diagrams, (4) illustrations related to daily life, (5) models, (6) illustrations related to the history of science, (7) pictures or diagrams of animal, vegetable or mineral samples, (8) analogies and (9) concepts of physics. The distribution of images among the categories showed a different emphasis in the presentation of chemical content due to a commitment to different conceptions of chemistry over the period. So, we started with chemistry as an experimental science in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis change to the principles of chemistry from the 1950s, culminating in a chemistry of undeniable technological influence. Results showed that reflections not only on the history of science, but on the history of science education, may be useful for the improvement of science education.

Accounting and auditing practices and procedures : hearings before the Subcommittee on Reports, Accounting, and Management of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session.

Hearings held Apr. 19-June 13, 1977.

The basic concepts of mathematics; a companion to current textbooks on algebra and analytic geometry.

pt.1. Algebra.

The principles of auditing; a practical manual for students and practitioners.

Mode of access: Internet.

Report of the Auditing Committee of the General Assembly and the Auditor of Public Accounts

Mode of access: Internet.

International library of technology; a series of textbooks for persons engaged in the engineering professions and trades,

Mode of access: Internet.

Auditing studies /

Mode of access: Internet.