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

This paper presents the Extended State Observer (ESO) based repetitive control (RC) for piezoelectric actuator (PEA) based nano-positioning systems. The system stability is proved using Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), which guarantees the asymptotic stability of the system. The ESObased RC used in this paper has the ability to eliminate periodic disturbances, aperiodic disturbances and model uncertainties. Moreover, ESO can be tuned using only two parameters and the model free approach of ESO-based RC, makes it an ideal solution to overcome the challenges of nano-positioning system control. Different types of periodic and aperiodic disturbances are used in simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. The comparison studi

Coumarins have been recognized as anticancer competitors. HDACis are one of the interesting issues in the field of antitumor research. In order to achieve an increased anticancer efficacy, a series of hybrid compounds bearing coumarin scaffolds have been designed and synthesized as novel HDACis, In this review we present a series of novel HDAC inhibitors comprising coumarin as a core e of cap group of HDAC inhibitors that have been designed, synthesized and assessed for their enzyme inhibitory activity as well as antiproliferative activity. Most of them exhibited potent HDAC inhibitory activity and significant cytotoxicity

     Compression for color image is now necessary for transmission and storage in the data bases since the color gives a pleasing nature and natural for any object, so three composite techniques based color image compression is implemented to achieve image with high compression, no loss in original image, better performance and good image quality. These techniques are composite stationary wavelet technique (S), composite wavelet technique (W) and composite multi-wavelet technique (M). For the high energy sub-band of the 3rd  level of each composite transform in each composite technique, the compression parameters are calculated. The best composite transform among the 27 types is the three levels of multi-wavelet

Audio classification is the process to classify different audio types according to contents. It is implemented in a large variety of real world problems, all classification applications allowed the target subjects to be viewed as a specific type of audio and hence, there is a variety in the audio types and every type has to be treatedcarefully according to its significant properties.Feature extraction is an important process for audio classification. This workintroduces several sets of features according to the type, two types of audio (datasets) were studied. Two different features sets are proposed: (i) firstorder gradient feature vector, and (ii) Local roughness feature vector, the experimentsshowed that the results are competitive to

A new technique for embedding image data into another BMP image data is presented. The image data to be embedded is referred to as signature image, while the image into which the signature image is embedded is referred as host image. The host and the signature images are first partitioned into 8x8 blocks, discrete cosine transformed “DCT”, only significant coefficients are retained, the retained coefficients then inserted in the transformed block in a forward and backward zigzag scan direction. The result then inversely transformed and presented as a BMP image file. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is exploited to evaluate the objective visual quality of the host image compared with the original image.

Compression for color image is now necessary for transmission and storage in the data bases since the color gives a pleasing nature and natural for any object, so three composite techniques based color image compression is implemented to achieve image with high compression, no loss in original image, better performance and good image quality. These techniques are composite stationary wavelet technique (S), composite wavelet technique (W) and composite multi-wavelet technique (M). For the high energy sub-band of the 3 rd level of each composite transform in each composite technique, the compression parameters are calculated. The best composite transform among the 27 types is the three levels of multi-wavelet transform (MMM) in M technique wh

Watermarking operation can be defined as a process of embedding special wanted and reversible information in important secure files to protect the ownership or information of the wanted cover file based on the proposed singular value decomposition (SVD) watermark. The proposed method for digital watermark has very huge domain for constructing final number and this mean protecting watermark from conflict. The cover file is the important image need to be protected. A hidden watermark is a unique number extracted from the cover file by performing proposed related and successive operations, starting by dividing the original image into four various parts with unequal size. Each part of these four treated as a separate matrix and applying SVD