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.
This 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 MoreThe fetal heart rate (FHR) signal processing based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN),Fuzzy Logic (FL) and frequency domain Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT) were analysis in order to perform automatic analysis using personal computers. Cardiotocography (CTG) is a primary biophysical method of fetal monitoring. The assessment of the printed CTG traces was based on the visual analysis of patterns that describing the variability of fetal heart rate signal. Fetal heart rate data of pregnant women with pregnancy between 38 and 40 weeks of gestation were studied. The first stage in the system was to convert the cardiotocograghy (CTG) tracing in to digital series so that the system can be analyzed ,while the second stage ,the FHR time series was t
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This paper deals with the design and implementation of an ECG system. The proposed system gives a new concept of ECG signal manipulation, storing, and editing. It consists mainly of hardware circuits and the related software. The hardware includes the circuits of ECG signals capturing, and system interfaces. The software is written using Visual Basic languages, to perform the task of identification of the ECG signal. The main advantage of the system is to provide a reported ECG recording on a personal computer, so that it can be stored and processed at any time as required. This system was tested for different ECG signals, some of them are abnormal and the other is normal, and the results show that the system has a good quality of diagno
... Show MoreThe quality of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) networks are considerably influenced by the configuration of the observed baselines. Where, this study aims to find an optimal configuration for GNSS baselines in terms of the number and distribution of baselines to improve the quality criteria of the GNSS networks. First order design problem (FOD) was applied in this research to optimize GNSS network baselines configuration, and based on sequential adjustment method to solve its objective functions.
FOD for optimum precision (FOD-p) was the proposed model which based on the design criteria of A-optimality and E-optimality. These design criteria were selected as objective functions of precision, whic
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A novel median filter based on crow optimization algorithms (OMF) is suggested to reduce the random salt and pepper noise and improve the quality of the RGB-colored and gray images. The fundamental idea of the approach is that first, the crow optimization algorithm detects noise pixels, and that replacing them with an optimum median value depending on a criterion of maximization fitness function. Finally, the standard measure peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity, absolute square error and mean square error have been used to test the performance of suggested filters (original and improved median filter) used to removed noise from images. It achieves the simulation based on MATLAB R2019b and the resul
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Identifying the total number of fruits on trees has long been of interest in agricultural crop estimation work. Yield prediction of fruits in practical environment is one of the hard and significant tasks to obtain better results in crop management system to achieve more productivity with regard to moderate cost. Utilized color vision in machine vision system to identify citrus fruits, and estimated yield information of the citrus grove in-real time. Fruit recognition algorithms based on color features to estimate the number of fruit. In the current research work, some low complexity and efficient image analysis approach was proposed to count yield fruits image in the natural scene. Semi automatic segmentation and yield calculation of fruit
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