Reductions in perceptual fluency have been shown to negatively impact attitudes towards learning material, but not learning itself. The current study extends this work to spoken presentations and examines whether the presence of a foreign accent negatively affects learners' experience in an online learning environment. Results indicate that the presence of an instructor accent, consistent with prior work on perceptual fluency, does not impact learning, but does cause learners to rate the instructor as less effective. Further, for those who received accented presentations, changes in participants' attitudes towards both the content area and online instruction were not predicted by learning, but instead their attitude towards the instructor. This suggests that learners in online learning environments with accented narration are potentially miscalibrated, and these biases in judgement could be inappropriately linked to a specific instructor, rather than their success of learning in the field.

This article focuses on assessing the performance of government secondary school head teachers in the context of heads' leader ship qualities, instructional behavior, capabilities of interpersonal relationships, professional attitude and managerial abilities. The small-scale survey was carried out in 2006 in district Mianwali, Pakistan. The sample comprised 150 secondary school teachers drawn at random from 15 government schools. Data was collected through a questionnaire comprising 38 items on a five-point rating scale on various aspects of head teacher performance. The instrument was validated through a pilot study and its reliability was established at 0.901 (Cronbach's alpha). Results revealed that the performance indicators of professional attitude, interpersonal relationship, leader ship qualities and managerial abilities were found to be better, but the aspect of instructional behavior was weaker among the head teachers. The performance of female head teachers in regard to instructional behavior, professional attitude and managerial abilities was found to be relatively better than those of their male counterparts. There were significant intercorrelations among all the independent variables of head teacher performance. K E Y W O R D S headteachers, instructional behavior, leadership qualities, managerial abilities, performance, professional attitude

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