VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Large eddy simulations of compressor turbulence
Keywords: Turbulence
Turbomachinery
Large Eddy Simulations

The DPhil thesis enclosed herein reports an investigation into turbulence in compressor passages, carried out using large eddy simulations (LES) of a repeating compressor stage. The thesis starts with a description of all the numerical tools used to conduct the research. First, the underlying assumptions of LES, as well as the governing equations and the discretization methods used in the in-house CFD solver, AU3X, are explained. This is followed by a brief account of the mesh generator developed in the current DPhil. Its ability to generate high-quality multi-block structured grids of turbomachinery blade passages, whilst also ensuring perfectly-balanced domain partitioning, is demonstrated. Finally, a novel sliding plane algorithm, developed with the aim of minimizing the communication cost in massively-parallel computations, is presented.
In the early stages of the DPhil, research was also carried out into the Reτ scaling of the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) modes of the two-point correlation tensor in turbulent channel flow. The POD modes represent an optimal basis for the two-point correlation tensor. The research conducted showed that POD modes corresponding to the large, i. e. half the channel height, streamwise and spanwise lengthscales exhibited good Reτ scaling once the large wall-normal modes were removed. Modes corresponding to smaller streamwise and spanwise lengthscales exhibited near universality even with the inclusion of the large wall-normal modes.
The focus of the investigation into turbulence in compressor passage turbulence was the Reynolds and deterministic stress fields. The repeating compressor stage computations were performed at three points on a compressor speed line; at the design condition and at two higher flow coefficients. In most of the domain, the Reynolds stresses were larger than the deterministic stresses, and also played a larger role in the timemean momentum balance. At the blade leading edge and passage inlet however, the deterministic stresses and deterministic stress divergence were comparable to, or larger than, the Reynolds stresses. The deterministic stresses were also significant in large phase-dependent unsteady flow features, i. e. the pressure side separation bubbles in the higher flow coefficient runs.
In the Reynolds stress budget, the deterministic stress field creates two additional budget terms: the deterministic production rate and the deterministic diffusion rate. The deterministic production and diffusion rate contributed significantly to the turbulent kinetic energy budget at the passage inlet and in the pressure side separation bubble. The deterministic production rate also appears in the deterministic stress budget, but with an opposite sign to that in the Reynolds stress budget. It is accompanied by another term that governs the rate at which Reynolds stresses transport periodic fluctuations. These were found to be the dominant terms in the deterministic kinetic energy budget throughout the blade surface boundary layers.
Social and economic lives of the ordinary poor in Ipswich, 1570-1620
Keywords: Early Modern
Family History
British History
Poverty

Using a tailored combination of methodologies and an array of sources, this thesis offers a case study of the ordinary social and economic lives of ‘the poor’ in the town of Ipswich between 1570 and 1620. Inspired by the well-known work of Amartya Sen, it defines poverty in a broad sense, aligning with many contemporary perceptions of ‘the poor’, but breaking with current historiographical norms for the boundaries of poverty, which are typically more restrictive in scope. Moreover, it argues against the use of terms including ‘marginal’ or ‘labouring’ poor to denote those who lived in more mild hardship. Instead, it offers a new descriptive term for this diverse group: the ‘ordinary poor’.
Overall, it analyses and juxtaposes the life experiences of the ‘ordinary poor’ and their relief-dependent counterparts in relation to the composition of these groups, their families, and how they approached their financial lives and their children’s futures. Its findings show more similarities than differences. For example, both groups were susceptible to hardship migration and the effects of epidemic disease, but only the relief-dependent poor were particularly susceptible to broken family units. They also engaged in similar varieties of occupations (lawful and unlawful), worked hard to provide secure financial futures for their children, and held comparable levels of wealth, the latter being determined more by the size of their nuclear family than their socio-economic status. In addition, this study considers how the tax structures of the period and the influential poor law statutes of 1598 and 1601 impacted the lives of the poor, arguing these factors created forms of entrenched socio-economic disadvantage, which resulted in ‘poverty traps’ that impeded the efforts of many among the poor to improve their situations.
An exploration of maternal support to children’s academic achievement in low‑cost private schools in Lahore
Keywords: CIE
CIE2017
MScEducation

With an increased recognition of the poor quality and limited availability of schools provided by the government, low cost private schools are experiencing exponential growth across Pakistan. By drawing on qualitative, semi structured interviews with 15 low income mothers of children enroled in primary low cost private schools in Lahore, this study explores the way mothers are responding to this development, focussing on maternal conceptualisations of the value of education, and the behaviours they adopt at home and in relation to the school in order to support their children’s academic achievement. This study finds that mothers tend to prefer private schools in place of public schools. The responses indicate this is due to increased private school availability within poorer communities, English language being offered as the medium of instruction, the presence of more and qualified teachers and the availability of basic infrastructure such as running water and electricity. Qualitative inquiries regarding behaviours suggest, despite limited resources and at times, illiteracy, mothers are determined to engage with their children’s academic performance in a variety of ways at home and in relation to the school. At home, they tend to involve themselves by checking their children’s homework, assisting in exam preparation and encouraging siblings to provide academic guidance to one another. Importantly, they also enrol their children in after school private tutoring as a way to provide indirect academic support to their children. In relation to the school, mothers regularly attend parent teacher meetings, and if necessary, visit the school in order to discuss their child’s progress, both academic and discipline related. Importantly, their interaction with the school is mostly limited to parent teacher meetings that are initiated by the teachers. The findings of this study emphasise the need for future scholarly attention on exploring low income mothers prioritisation of private tutoring as a popular form of indirect academic support to their children. Additionally, the findings call for an investigation of the limited interaction between low cost schools and parents, particularly mothers, as they appear to be the more involved parents in low income communities in Lahore and exhibit a desire to engage more actively.
Motivations for pursuing postgraduate study in the UK: Perspectives of Chinese graduates of a Sino-British cooperative university
Keywords: CIE2019
CIE
MScEducation

Joining the global trend of internationalisation, higher education in the Chinese context has witnessed remarkable outbound flows of students and a thriving market of transnational education. With China and the UK forging formal arrangements for educational exchange, the UK has become one of the top destinations for Chinese international students and British higher education institutions have been proactively developing partnerships with Chinese institutions. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study examines the motivations of Chinese graduates of a Sino-British cooperative university for pursuing postgraduate study in the UK and the impacts of their previous undergraduate experience on their decision-making. The research reveals novel insights into international students’ study choices and the emerging relationship between student mobility to the UK and the growing availability of transnational education offered by British institutions. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten students who had spent their four undergraduate years in mainland China in a Sino-British university and then chose to enroll in master’s programmes in the UK. The data analysis adopted the Miles and Huberman framework (Miles, Hubermann, & Saldaña, 2013). From the analysis, the research uncovers four common themes in the students’ motivations for doing a master’s degree abroad: academic motives, career development motives, self-formation motives, and the influence of peer norms. The research also discovers five themes in the students’ choice of the UK as the overseas study destination: knowledge and awareness, academic considerations, career development, social environment, and financial cost. Additionally, it is found that the study experience at a SinoBritish cooperative university had a defining influence on the formulation of these two aspects of their motivations. Not only did it inspire the students to pursue higher education abroad for the sake of personal development, but it also contributed to their overwhelming preference for undertaking postgraduate study in the UK.
Technological partnership in everyday life: exploring the user-identities of postgraduate students in technology-related courses
Keywords: L&amp;T2018
L&amp;T
MScEducation

This study is guided by the underlying assumption that learning takes place through mediated processes. More particularly, learning is facilitated by the tools we use in everyday life. The rise of digital technology has led to new ways of examining and understanding learning as it occurs in both everyday life and across the life course. How one interacts with digital technology is likely to influence one’s learning across different domains of life from school to work to leisure.
This dissertation explores the concept of the ‘user-identity’ to examine the ways individuals interact and make use of digital technology in their everyday lives. User-identities can be conceptualized through the ‘digital mindsets’ individuals hold towards digital technology, as these in turn shape the ‘technological partnerships’ they exercise in everyday life. In understanding the identities of individuals as users of digital technology, I argue, we may better understand the ways they learn with these technologies through everyday activities and processes with digital technology.
Using this innovative theoretical concept, I explore the user-identities of 18 postgraduate students in technology-related courses through semi-structured interviews. User-identities expressed by participants demonstrate that these were significantly influenced by their educational and occupational pathways, where digital technology were likely to play a formal part of their learning. The study also suggests that user-identities are shaped over time across an individual’s wider learning life with digital technology and these develop across trajectories (education and occupational), identities (everyday users and specialists), and contexts (informal and formal) for learning and using digital technology.
With the increasing number of affordances in everyday life, users are given more flexibility and freedom over their technological activities. New ways of examining individual interactions with digital technology must be developed, as these now shape not only learning outcomes but also other life chances. I end with a recommendation of user-identities as an analytic concept for future learning and technology research. Such a concept may also be relevant in other fields such as new media research and digital sociology.
Why cognitive skills matter for development and what explains their variation
Keywords: CIE
CIE2019

Growth theories and the role of human capital formation in development remain widely-discussed topics in the field of education economics. While a plethora of studies that use school enrollment rates as a proxy for human capital fail to explain the variation in per-capita GDP growth, more recent work in the economics of education shows that cognitive skills are essential for development. How these skills are formed, however, is less clear and should be investigated. This dissertation examines whether cognitive skills, measured by science and mathematics, explain human development in Sudan. Drawing on the 2018 Sudanese National Learning Assessment, part of the Basic Education Recovery Project of World Bank (2019a), the questions are: Do cognitive skills matter for development? If so, what explains their variation? The findings, achieved through correlation analyses between state-level poverty rates and science & mathematics achievement, show a robust significant relationship. Additionally, multivariate OLS models indicate that components of Cunha and Heckman (2007) theory on skill formation such as subsequent achievement, parental and environmental factors and a student asset index created with a machine-learning algorithm explain the variation in science achievement.
Does student-centred learning improve learning outcomes in Indian classrooms?
Keywords: MScEducation
CIE
CIE2015

In an effort to improve education quality in developing countries, as outlined by the EFA2015 goals, student-centred learning (SCL) has been identified as a promising avenue for pedagogical reform. The promotion of SCL, usually through teacher-training programs, has received wide support from international development agencies. Situated within a case study of the TESS-India project, the present research explores whether SCL actually improves student learning outcomes. It contributes both theoretically to the debate on SCL efficacy, as well as to the policy debate on pedagogical reform.
The research, conducted in 15 government schools in Karnataka, finds that SCL has a positive correlation with learning outcomes in primary schools but not in secondary schools. Furthermore, it finds that SCL is already a marked feature of Indian classrooms, despite the fact that teachers lack a sophisticated understanding of how SCL contributes to learning. Lastly, this research identifies a number of barriers to the successful promotion of SCL in Indian classrooms, and suggests a number of institutional, infrastructural, and intellectual reforms that might need to go hand-in-hand with pedagogical reform.
Negotiating publicity, publicising domesticity: women-authored Heian kana memoirs, circulation, reception, and power
Keywords: Domesticity
Literary Circulation
Reception
Court literature

I examine the evolution of the socio-literary image of female middle-ranking producers of text in the late Heian period, and how it was informed by different understandings of domesticity and its interplay with the public sphere—both in these authors’ work and in later re-contextualisations; discussing relations between these writers and higher ranking patrons/husbands, the negotiation of loss of control over textual production and public persona, and it contemplates questions of patronage, forced circulation, and intertextuality. In order to do so, it focuses primarily on the power dynamics underlying the portrayal and significance of domestic and household-centred literary circulation in women-authored texts and others that exemplify their reception; addressing firstly, the different ways in which household and court-based kana nikki 仮名日記 (diary, memoir) authors conceptualise domesticity and their position within it as a tool to articulate their relation to broader society, and secondly, how they respond and negotiate around this conception.
This thesis presents a comparative approach to different modes of authorship, dynamics of patronage, questions of publicity, the circulation of women-authored texts, and their relation with the sphere of domesticity; and finds itself in the intersection between premodern literature and Queer studies.
Essays on the econometric analysis of forward-looking behaviour in health care markets
Keywords: Insurance
Regression discontinuity
Medicare
Prevention

This dissertation makes three contributions to the economics literature. Chapter 1 finds that expanding health insurance that covers treatment but not prevention can discourage prevention to a large extent, when the prior literature only recovered small effects (if at all). It also uses a simple economic model to reconcile the results with estimates found in other studies. Chapter 2 shows that a regression-discontinuity design can be used to determine whether the long-run effect of a discontinuous change differs from the short-run effect traditionally estimated by these designs when the assignment variable is deterministically linked to time. Chapter 3 examines subjective medical expenses forecasts, and finds that they depart from the forecasts that would be made by a hypothetical agent that incorporated all of the relevant information in the decision-making environment.
Development of teachers' dialogic teaching using the CoRe framework: planning for transformation and contingency
Keywords: MTEd2018
MTEd

This research project focuses on the development of two beginning teachers’ practice in physics classrooms over an academic year. Both teachers are in their first three years of teaching and one is a physics specialist while the other is a non-specialist. Within a mentoring relationship with the teacher educator, a framework called Content Representation (or CoRe) (Loughran et al., 2012) was used to develop dialogic teaching in their classrooms. The completion of CoRes by expert teachers had allowed their pedagogical and subject knowledge to be shared with the beginning teachers who had used them to plan for dialogic teaching. Elliott’s (1991) model of action research is applied to investigate the research questions set at the start and throughout the study. A qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews was adopted to explore the beginning teachers’ beliefs and practice. This included lesson observations and feedback carried out over each of the three school terms (or phases). During the first phase (phase-1) baseline-data was collected to explore the teachers’ practice. In phase-2, data collection aimed to reveal to what extent the CoRe framework was effective in developing dialogic teaching. Also, during this phase, the extent to which my mentoring was effective was explored. Data collection in phase-3 aimed to find out to what extent the CoRe we had modified (CoRe2) was effective in developing dialogic teaching. Lessons were analysed using a framework called the Knowledge Quartet (KQ) (Rowland et al., 2005) and Alexander’s five principles of dialogic teaching and related indicators (Alexander, 2017).
The findings suggest that the CoRe framework can support beginning teachers plan for dialogic teaching. In particular, the modified version, CoRe2, had been useful for them to consider activities that encouraged student talk. The findings also suggest that the constructivist-oriented mentoring received by the teachers had allowed them to be involved in their own development in the classroom. These findings will be shared with colleagues at the Institute of Physics (IOP) who are also expert physics practitioners working with teachers to develop their practice. This will have implications for the way we cater for the needs of both specialist and non-specialist novices teaching physics.
Objectives and Key Results in the classroom: a framework for practice development on goal-setting
Keywords: MTEd2018
MTEd

Student motivation and engagement seem to be more important than ever considering information technology has rendered learning away from a classroom setting relatively commonplace. Also, recent research has provided evidence that the lack of non-cognitive skills may be harming academic results in developing countries such as Brazil. Motivated by these two circumstances, this study aimed to investigate the use of a modern goal-setting framework, Objectives and Key Results (OKR), as a tool to improve teachers´ leadership skills and foster a more structured teacher/student dialogue about performance. A randomised controlled trial (RCT) was conducted to estimate the short-term effect caused on teachers by a lecture on OKR. Positive effects were detected, but the sample size prevents these results to be considered statistically significant. A single teacher OKR pilot was carried out to identify a manner of use for the framework in the classroom context. Pilot results look promising and probably justify the continuation of the research.
Fostering beginning teachers' competence in using talk and questions to promote effective teaching in science classrooms
Keywords: MTEd2018
MTEd

The reform of school science curriculum is taking place in China, requiring teachers to use meaningful questions which can stimulate students’ interest, promote inquiry-based learning and develop higher-order thinking skills.
The interview with three chemistry beginning teaches in my context about their views on science teaching and assessment and observation of their daily normal lessons showed that although they wanted to develop students’ problem-solving abilities and help students to understand the process of knowledge discovery, all teachers regarded delivery of science knowledge as the key role of a science teacher and teachers usually had little interest in engaging students in class discussion and exploring their ideas. In response to the demanding requirement of recent science education standards and the lack of support for teachers to develop their strategies, a school-based teacher education program was initiated to find out to what extent an intervention designed to develop teachers’ use of questions could develop their practice in three areas: a. using class talk and questions to create more interactive and dialogic environment aiming to increase the participation of students in class, b. asking more higher-level questions, c. conducting assessment for learning.
After theoretical input, teachers were provided with opportunities to better understand these new ideas and put them into planning and delivery of lessons in practice. The teacher educator offered continuous support and guidance to facilitate their learning and practice. Various data and evidence were collected to record professional progress of three beginning teachers in using more dialogic interaction and higher level questions to promote student thinking and do formative assessment. The research project also attempts to establish a feasible and effective mode of teacher education in my context by drawing on various theoretical and empirically-based literatures on teacher education models and principles that underpin the successful teacher education. Alongside the teacher growth, the teacher educator has developed various knowledge and competencies required for his own professional development.