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

Background :Atherosclerosis is the most
frequent underlying cause of ischemic heart
disease and a major cause of death all over the
world. This study was carried out to analyze and
compare the angiographic findings in patients
with diabetes mellitus versus non diabetics with
coronary heart disease , and to correlate these
findings with some risk factors for coronary
heart disease.
Methods: A total of 100 patients were studied,
50 with diabetes mellitus, and 50 non diabetics.
This study was carried out at Al-Sadr teaching
hospital in Basrah, Southern Iraq during the
period April 2009- September 2009. All patients
were known to have coronary heart disease. Risk
factors for coronary heart disease

The application of physiological oxygen (physoxia) concentrations is becoming increasingly commonplace within a mammalian stem cell culture. Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) attract widespread interest for clinical application due to their unique immunomodulatory, multi-lineage potential, and regenerative capacities. Descriptions of the impact of physoxia on global DNA methylation patterns in hMSCs and the activity of enzymatic machinery responsible for its regulation remain limited. Human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-hMSCs, passage 1) isolated in reduced oxygen conditions displayed an upregulation of SOX2 in reduced oxygen conditions vs. air oxygen (21% O2, AO), while no change was noted for either OCT-4 or NA

Background: The world health organization estimates that worldwide 2 billion people still have iodine deficiency Objectives: Is to make comparison between the effect of identification of recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) and non-identification of the nerve on incidence of recurrent laryngeal nerve injury (RLNI) in different thyroidectomy procedures.

Type of the study: cross –sectional study.

Methods: 132 patients with goiters underwent thyroidectomy .Identification of RLN visually by exposure were done for agroup of them and non-identification of the nerves for the other group. The outcomes of RLNI in the two groupsanalyzed statistically for the effect of

Background: Patients with decompensated cirrhosis are often given therapeutic and prophylactic drugs. Polypharmacy raises both the likelihood of prescription errors and the complications associated with drugs. Clinical pharmacists are excellent at recognizing, addressing, and preventing clinically significant drug-related problems.

Objectives: Identification types of pharmacist interventions to address drug-related problems in patients with decompensated cirrhosis and assess the acceptance/implementation of these recommendations. And identify patient factors associated with accepting pharmacist recommend

Background: Gastroesophageal reflux disease, is a quite prevalent gastrointestinal disease, among which gastric content (excluding the air) returns into the oral cavity. Many 0ral manifestations related t0 this disease include tooth wear, dental caries also changes in salivary flow rate and pH. This study was conducted among gastroesophageal reflux disease patients in order to assess tooth wear in relation to salivary flow rate and pH among these patients and the effect of gastroesophageal reflux disease duration on this relation. Materials and methods: One hundred patients participate in this cross-sectional study for both genders and having an age range of 20-40 years old, patients had been endoscopically identified as having gastroeso

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is one of recent years multicarrier modulation used in order to combat the Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) introduced by frequency selective mobile radio channel. The circular extension of the data symbol, commonly referred to as cyclic prefix is one of the key elements in an OFDM transmission scheme. This paper study The influence of the cyclic prefix duration on the BER performance of an OFDM-VCPL (Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing - Variable Cyclic Prefix Length) system and the conventional OFDM system with frame 64-QAM modulation is evaluated by means of computer simulation in a multipath fading channel. The adaptation of CP is done with respect to the delay spread estimation

The current study aims at using non-hatchable artemia eggs of local origin and making use of these eggs by decapsulating and presenting them as food for the larvae of the Cyprinus carpio as a source of animal protein with high nutritional value instead of throwing them away. The results showed that the second parameter (A2) was highly significant at the level (P≤0.05) in the growth rates of the larvae that were fed on decapsulated artemia eggs alone, and it was better than the two control parameters (A1), in which the larvae were fed with feed designated for Cyprinus carpio fish. It also outperformed the third parameter (A3), in which the feed was mixed with artemia eggs with 50% decapsulation, which also outperformed the control paramete