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.
Free-Space Optical (FSO) can provide high-speed communications when the effect of turbulence is not serious. However, Space-Time-Block-Code (STBC) is a good candidate to mitigate this seriousness. This paper proposes a hybrid of an Optical Code Division Multiple Access (OCDMA) and STBC in FSO communication for last mile solutions, where access to remote areas is complicated. The main weakness effecting a FSO link is the atmospheric turbulence. The feasibility of employing STBC in OCDMA is to mitigate these effects. The current work evaluates the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance of OCDMA operating under the scintillation effect, where this effect can be described by the gamma-gamma model. The most obvious finding to emerge from the analysis
... Show MoreBackground: Scientific education aims to be inclusive and to improve students learning achievements, through appropriate teaching and learning. Problem Based Learning (PBL) system, a student centered method, started in the second half of the previous century and is expanding progressively, organizes learning around problems and students learn about a subject through the experience of solving these problems.Objectives:To assess the opinions of undergraduate medical students regarding learning outcomes of PBL in small group teaching and to explore their views about the role of tutors and methods of evaluation. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study.Methods: This study was conducted in Kerbala Medical Colleges among second year students
... Show MoreThis study aims at shedding light on the linguistic significance of collocation networks in the academic writing context. Following Firth’s principle “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” The study intends to examine three selected nodes (i.e. research, study, and paper) shared collocations in an academic context. This is achieved by using the corpus linguistic tool; GraphColl in #LancsBox software version 5 which was announced in June 2020 in analyzing selected nodes. The study focuses on academic writing of two corpora which were designed and collected especially to serve the purpose of the study. The corpora consist of a collection of abstracts extracted from two different academic journals that publish for writ
... Show MoreBlockchain has garnered the most attention as the most important new technology that supports recent digital transactions via e-government. The most critical challenge for public e-government systems is reducing bureaucracy and increasing the efficiency and performance of administrative processes in these systems since blockchain technology can play a role in a decentralized environment and execute a high level of security transactions and transparency. So, the main objectives of this work are to survey different proposed models for e-government system architecture based on blockchain technology implementation and how these models are validated. This work studies and analyzes some research trends focused on blockchain
... Show MoreThe designer must find the optimum match between the object's technical and economic needs and the performance and production requirements of the various material options when choosing material for an engineering application. This study proposes an integrated (hybrid) strategy for selecting the optimal material for an engineering design depending on design requirements. The primary objective is to determine the best candidate material for the drone wings based on Ashby's performance indices and then rank the result using a grey relational technique with the entropy weight method. Aluminum alloys, titanium alloys, composites, and wood have been suggested as suitable materials for manufacturing drone wings. The requirement
... Show More<p><span>A Botnet is one of many attacks that can execute malicious tasks and develop continuously. Therefore, current research introduces a comparison framework, called BotDetectorFW, with classification and complexity improvements for the detection of Botnet attack using CICIDS2017 dataset. It is a free online dataset consist of several attacks with high-dimensions features. The process of feature selection is a significant step to obtain the least features by eliminating irrelated features and consequently reduces the detection time. This process implemented inside BotDetectorFW using two steps; data clustering and five distance measure formulas (cosine, dice, driver & kroeber, overlap, and pearson correlation
... Show MorePolyaniline Multi wall Carbon nanotube (PANI/MWCNTs) nanocomposite thin films have been prepared by Plasma jet polymerization at low frequency on glass substrate with preliminary deposited aluminum electrodes to form Al/PANI-MWCNT/Al surface-type capacitive humidity sensors, the gap between the electrodes about 50 μm and the MWCNTs weight concentration varied between 0, 1, 2, 3, 4%. The diameter of the MWCNTs was in the range of 8-15 nm and the length 10-55 μm. The capacitance-humidity relationships of the sensors were investigated at humidity levels from 35 to 90% RH. The electrical properties showed that the capacity increased with increasing relative humidity, and that the sensitivity of the sensor increases with the increase of the
... Show MoreThe design and implementation of an active router architecture that enables flexible network programmability based on so-called "user components" will be presents. This active router is designed to provide maximum flexibility for the development of future network functionality and services. The designed router concentrated mainly on the use of Windows Operating System, enhancing the Active Network Encapsulating Protocol (ANEP). Enhancing ANEP gains a service composition scheme which enables flexible programmability through integration of user components into the router's data path. Also an extended program that creates and then injects data packets into the network stack of the testing machine will be proposed, we will call this program
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