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

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

Image compression is a serious issue in computer storage and transmission,  that simply makes efficient use of redundancy embedded within an image itself; in addition, it may exploit human vision or perception limitations to reduce the imperceivable information Polynomial coding is a modern image compression technique based on modelling concept to remove the spatial redundancy embedded within the image effectively that composed of two parts, the  mathematical model and the residual. In this paper, two stages proposed technqies adopted, that starts by utilizing the lossy predictor model along with multiresolution base and thresholding techniques corresponding to first stage. Latter by incorporating the near lossless com

Homomorphic encryption became popular and powerful cryptographic primitive for various cloud computing applications. In the recent decades several developments has been made. Few schemes based on coding theory have been proposed but none of them support unlimited operations with security.   We propose a modified Reed-Muller Code based symmetric key fully homomorphic encryption to improve its security by using message expansion technique. Message expansion with prepended random fixed length string provides one-to-many mapping between message and codeword, thus one-to many mapping between plaintext and ciphertext. The proposed scheme supports both (MOD 2) additive and multiplication operations unlimitedly.   We make an effort to prove

Pure and doped TiO 2 with Bi films are obtained by pulse laser deposition technique at RT under vacume 10-3 mbar, and the influence of Bi content on the photocvoltaic properties of TiO 2 hetrojunctions is studied. All the films display photovoltaic in the near visible region. A broad double peaks are observed around λ= 300nm for pure TiO 2 at RT in the spectral response of the photocurrent, which corresponds approximately to the absorption edge and this peak shift to higher wavelength (600 nm) when Bi content increase by 7% then decrease by 9%. The result is confirmed with the decreasing of the energy gap in optical properties. Also, the increasing is due to an increase in the amount of Bi content, and shifted to 400nm when annealed at 523

Optical fiber chemical sensor based surface Plasmon resonance for sensing and measuring the refractive index and concentration for Acetic acid is designed and implemented during this work. Optical grade plastic optical fibers with a diameter of 1000μm were used with a diameter core of 980μm and a cladding of 20μm, where the sensor is fabricated by a small part (10mm) of optical fiber in the middle is embedded in a resin block and then the polishing process is done, after that it is deposited with about (40nm) thickness of gold metal and the Acetic acid is placed on the sensing probe.

Ground-based active optical sensors (GBAOS) have been successfully used in agriculture to predict crop yield potential (YP) early in the season and to improvise N rates for optimal crop yield. However, the models were found weak or inconsistent due to environmental variation especially rainfall. The objectives of the study were to evaluate if GBAOS could predict YP across multiple locations, soil types, cultivation systems, and rainfall differences. This study was carried from 2011 to 2013 on corn (Zea mays L.) in North Dakota, and in 2017 in potatoes in Maine. Six N rates were used on 50 sites in North Dakota and 12 N rates on two sites, one dryland and one irrigated, in Maine. Two active GBAOS used for this study were GreenSeeker and Holl