Improving students’ use of argumentation is front and center in the increasing emphasis on scientific practice in K-12 Science and STEM programs. We explore the construct validity of scenario-based assessments of claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) and the structure of the CER construct with respect to a learning progression framework. We also seek to understand how middle school students progress. Establishing the purpose of an argument is a competency that a majority of middle school students meet, whereas quantitative reasoning is the most difficult, and the Rasch model indicates that the competencies form a unidimensional hierarchy of skills. We also find no evidence of differential item functioning between different scenarios, suggesting

Cryptography is the process of transforming message to avoid an unauthorized access of data. One of the main problems and an important part in cryptography with secret key algorithms is key. For higher level of secure communication key plays an important role. For increasing the level of security in any communication, both parties must have a copy of the secret key which, unfortunately, is not that easy to achieve. Triple Data Encryption Standard algorithm is weak due to its weak key generation, so that key must be reconfigured to make this algorithm more secure, effective, and strong. Encryption key enhances the Triple Data Encryption Standard algorithm securities. This paper proposed a combination of two efficient encryption algorithms to

This study focused on spectral clustering (SC) and three-constraint affinity matrix spectral clustering (3CAM-SC) to determine the number of clusters and the membership of the clusters of the COST 2100 channel model (C2CM) multipath dataset simultaneously. Various multipath clustering approaches solve only the number of clusters without taking into consideration the membership of clusters. The problem of giving only the number of clusters is that there is no assurance that the membership of the multipath clusters is accurate even though the number of clusters is correct. SC and 3CAM-SC aimed to solve this problem by determining the membership of the clusters. The cluster and the cluster count were then computed through the cluster-wise J

We present a reliable algorithm for solving, homogeneous or inhomogeneous, nonlinear ordinary delay differential equations with initial conditions. The form of the solution is calculated as a series with easily computable components. Four examples are considered for the numerical illustrations of this method. The results reveal that the semi analytic iterative method (SAIM) is very effective, simple and very close to the exact solution demonstrate reliability and efficiency of this method for such problems.

Fingerprint recognition is one among oldest procedures of identification. An important step in automatic fingerprint matching is to mechanically and dependably extract features. The quality of the input fingerprint image has a major impact on the performance of a feature extraction algorithm. The target of this paper is to present a fingerprint recognition technique that utilizes local features for fingerprint representation and matching. The adopted local features have determined: (i) the energy of Haar wavelet subbands, (ii) the normalized of Haar wavelet subbands. Experiments have been made on three completely different sets of features which are used when partitioning the fingerprint into overlapped blocks. Experiments are conducted on

Abstract

Much attention has been paid for the use of robot arm in various applications. Therefore, the optimal path finding has a significant role to upgrade and guide the arm movement. The essential function of path planning is to create a path that satisfies the aims of motion including, averting obstacles collision, reducing time interval, decreasing the path traveling cost and satisfying the kinematics constraints. In this paper, the free Cartesian space map of 2-DOF arm is constructed to attain the joints variable at each point without collision. The D*algorithm and Euclidean distance are applied to obtain the exact and estimated distances to the goal respectively. The modified Particle Swarm Optimization al