Examining Elementary School Science Achievement Gaps Using an Organizational and Leadership Perspective

There is the tendency to explain away successful urban schools as indicative of the heroic efforts by a tireless individual, effectively blaming schools that underperform for a lack of grit and dedication. This study reports the development of a research instrument (School Science Infrastructure, or SSI) and then applying that tool to an investigation of equitable science performance by elementary schools. Our efforts to develop a science‐specific instrument to explore associations between school‐level variables and equitable science performance are informed by James Coleman's tripartite notion of social capital: the “wealth” of organizations is encompassed within their social norms, informational channels, and reciprocating relationships. Grounded in school effectiveness research and social capital theory, the instrument that we report on here is a valid and reliable tool to support meso‐level investigations of factors contributing to school variations in science achievement.     

Semi-quantum private comparison protocol of size relation with d-dimensional GHZ states

A novel efficient semi-quantum private comparison protocol based on the d-dimensional GHZ states is proposed.With the assistance of semi-honest third party,two classical participants can compare the size relation of their secrets without any information leakage.To reduce the consumption of quantum devices,the qubit efficiency of our protocol is improved by introducing the semi-quantum conception via the existing semi-quantum private comparisons.Furthermore,it is unnecessary to prepare the secure classical authentication channel among participants in advance.It is shown that our protocol is not only correct and efficient,but also free from external and internal attacks.     

On the Existence of XOR-Based Codes for Private Information Retrieval with Private Side Information

We consider the problem of Private Information Retrieval with Private Side Information (PIR-PSI), wherein the privacy of the demand and the side information are jointly preserved. Although the capacity of the PIR-PSI setting is known, we observe that the underlying capacity-achieving code construction uses Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes therefore contributing to high computational complexity when retrieving the demand. Pointing at this drawback of MDS-based PIR-PSI codes, we propose XOR-based PIR-PSI codes for a simple yet non-trivial setting of two non-colluding databases and two side information files at the user. Although our codes offer substantial reduction in complexity when compared to MDS-based codes, the code-rate marginally falls short of the capacity of the PIR-PSI setting. Nevertheless, we show that our code-rate is strictly higher than that of XOR-based codes for PIR with no side information. As a result, our codes can be useful when privately downloading a file especially after having downloaded a few other messages privately from the same database at an earlier time-instant.