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.
Photonic crystal fiber interferometers are used in many sensing applications. In this work, an in-reflection photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based on Mach-Zehnder (micro-holes collapsing) (MZ) interferometer, which exhibits high sensitivity to different volatile organic compounds (VOCs), without the needing of any permeable material. The interferometer is robust, compact, and consists of a stub photonic crystal fiber of large-mode area, photonic crystal fiber spliced to standard single mode fiber (SMF) (corning-28), this splicing occurs with optimized splice loss 0.19 dB In the splice regions the voids of the holey fiber are completely collapsed, which allows the excitation and recombination of core and cladding modes. The device reflection
... Show MoreCapacitive–resistive humidity sensors based on polythiophene (P3HT) organic semiconductor as an active material hybrid with three types of metallic nanoparticles (NP) (Ag, Al, and Cu) were synthesized by pulsed laser ablation (PLA). The hybrid P3HT/metallic nanoparticles were deposited on indium-tin-oxide (ITO) substrate at room temperature. The surface morphology of theses samples was studied by using field emission scanning electron micrographs (FE-SEM), which indicated the formation of nanoparticles with grain size of about 50nm. The electrical characteristics of the sensors were examined as a function of the relative humidity levels. The sensors showed an increase in the capacitance with variation in the humidity level. Whil
... Show MoreFace Identification system is an active research area in these years. However, the accuracy and its dependency in real life systems are still questionable. Earlier research in face identification systems demonstrated that LBP based face recognition systems are preferred than others and give adequate accuracy. It is robust against illumination changes and considered as a high-speed algorithm. Performance metrics for such systems are calculated from time delay and accuracy. This paper introduces an improved face recognition system that is build using C++ programming language with the help of OpenCV library. Accuracy can be increased if a filter or combinations of filters are applied to the images. The accuracy increases from 95.5% (without ap
... Show MoreData steganography is a technique used to hide data, secret message, within another data, cover carrier. It is considered as a part of information security. Audio steganography is a type of data steganography, where the secret message is hidden in audio carrier. This paper proposes an efficient audio steganography method that uses LSB technique. The proposed method enhances steganography performance by exploiting all carrier samples and balancing between hiding capacity and distortion ratio. It suggests an adaptive number of hiding bits for each audio sample depending on the secret message size, the cover carrier size, and the signal to noise ratio (SNR). Comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms state of the art methods
... Show MoreMost recognition system of human facial emotions are assessed solely on accuracy, even if other performance criteria are also thought to be important in the evaluation process such as sensitivity, precision, F-measure, and G-mean. Moreover, the most common problem that must be resolved in face emotion recognition systems is the feature extraction methods, which is comparable to traditional manual feature extraction methods. This traditional method is not able to extract features efficiently. In other words, there are redundant amount of features which are considered not significant, which affect the classification performance. In this work, a new system to recognize human facial emotions from images is proposed. The HOG (Histograms of Or
... Show MoreDigital Elevation Model (DEM) is one of the developed techniques for relief representation. The definition of a DEM construction is the modeling technique of earth surface from existing data. DEM plays a role as one of the fundamental information requirement that has been generally utilized in GIS data structures. The main aim of this research is to present a methodology for assessing DEMs generation methods. The DEMs data will be extracted from open source data e.g. Google Earth. The tested data will be compared with data produced from formal institutions such as General Directorate of Surveying. The study area has been chosen in south of Iraq (Al-Gharraf / Dhi Qar governorate. The methods of DEMs creation are kriging, IDW (inver
... Show MoreOrthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an efficient multi-carrier technique.The core operation in the OFDM systems is the FFT/IFFT unit that requires a large amount of hardware resources and processing delay. The developments in implementation techniques likes Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies have made OFDM a feasible option. The goal of this paper is to design and implement an OFDM transmitter based on Altera FPGA using Quartus software. The proposed transmitter is carried out to simplify the Fourier transform calculation by using decoder instead of multipliers. After programming ALTERA DE2 FPGA kit with implemented project, several practical tests have been done starting from monitoring all the results of
... Show MoreIn this paper, a national grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system is proposed. It extracts the maximum power point (MPP) using three-incremental-steps perturb and observe (TISP&O) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method. It improves the classic P&O by using three incremental duty ratio (ΔD) instead of a single one in the conventional P and O MPPT method. Therefore, the system's performance is improved to a higher speed and less power fluctuation around the MPP. The Boost converter controls the MPPT and then is connected to a three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI). This type of inverter needs a high and constant input voltage. A second-order low pass (LC) filter is connected to the output of VSI to reduce t
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