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 that multiple scenarios can be utilized in the context of a multi-level assessment framework for measuring the impacts of learning experiences on students’ argumentation.
Speech is the essential way to interact between humans or between human and machine. However, it is always contaminated with different types of environment noise. Therefore, speech enhancement algorithms (SEA) have appeared as a significant approach in speech processing filed to suppress background noise and return back the original speech signal. In this paper, a new efficient two-stage SEA with low distortion is proposed based on minimum mean square error sense. The estimation of clean signal is performed by taking the advantages of Laplacian speech and noise modeling based on orthogonal transform (Discrete Krawtchouk-Tchebichef transform) coefficients distribution. The Discrete Kra
Arabic text categorization for pattern recognitions is challenging. We propose for the first time a novel holistic method based on clustering for classifying Arabic writer. The categorization is accomplished stage-wise. Firstly, these document images are sectioned into lines, words, and characters. Secondly, their structural and statistical features are obtained from sectioned portions. Thirdly, F-Measure is used to evaluate the performance of the extracted features and their combination in different linkage methods for each distance measures and different numbers of groups. Finally, experiments are conducted on the standard KHATT dataset of Arabic handwritten text comprised of varying samples from 1000 writers. The results in the generatio
... Show MoreIt has been shown recently that there is a need to design smart structures, such as smart houses, in order to be controlled in different ways. That will be in high demand due to its usefulness for some people who are incapable of reaching some control units that require direct interaction with human beings. In this paper, we propose and develop a new enhanced electroencephalography (EEG)-based smart structure setup that can be utilized to assist people, with or without disorders, to control devices in an easy and comfortable way. Ten people of a wide range of ages (20–65) and both genders actively participated in this research. Consequently, eight EEG channels are employed in this study to cover most of the brain’s regions, and the prot
... Show MoreThis study assessed the advantage of using earthworms in combination with punch waste and nutrients in remediating drill cuttings contaminated with hydrocarbons. Analyses were performed on day 0, 7, 14, 21, and 28 of the experiment. Two hydrocarbon concentrations were used (20000 mg/kg and 40000 mg/kg) for three groups of earthworms number which were five, ten and twenty earthworms. After 28 days, the total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) concentration (20000 mg/kg) was reduced to 13200 mg/kg, 9800 mg/kg, and 6300 mg/kg in treatments with five, ten and twenty earthworms respectively. Also, TPH concentration (40000 mg/kg) was reduced to 22000 mg/kg, 10100 mg/kg, and 4200 mg/kg in treatments with the above number of earthworms respectively. The p
... Show MoreAuthentication is the process of determining whether someone or something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be. As the dependence upon computers and computer networks grows, the need for user authentication has increased. User’s claimed identity can be verified by one of several methods. One of the most popular of these methods is represented by (something user know), such as password or Personal Identification Number (PIN). Biometrics is the science and technology of authentication by identifying the living individual’s physiological or behavioral attributes. Keystroke authentication is a new behavioral access control system to identify legitimate users via their typing behavior. The objective of this paper is to provide user
... Show MoreToday with increase using social media, a lot of researchers have interested in topic extraction from Twitter. Twitter is an unstructured short text and messy that it is critical to find topics from tweets. While topic modeling algorithms such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are originally designed to derive topics from large documents such as articles, and books. They are often less efficient when applied to short text content like Twitter. Luckily, Twitter has many features that represent the interaction between users. Tweets have rich user-generated hashtags as keywords. In this paper, we exploit the hashtags feature to improve topics learned