VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Groupwork and Feedback: Does the introduction of group average feedback impact on student opinion of groupwork in a mathematics class?
Keywords: Mathematics
MLT2017
MLT

From a mathematics teacher perspective, group work is an invaluable learning tool which allows for discussion and sharing of ideas and methods with peers and friends. However students can appear not to share our affinity for group work, often complaining of unfair distribution of workload and competition within groups. To investigate the impact of individual accountability combined with group reward incentive (Boaler, 2008; Johnson and Johnson, 2008) on student opinion on group work within the mathematics classroom, an intervention was implemented in which students were placed in heterogeneous ability groups for a term with individual assessment results contributing to a group average result at the end of the term.
This intervention utilised the STAD (Slavin, 1983;2015) method of collaborative teaching and learning by utilising group average feedback to improve and encourage cooperative learning with groups in maths lessons. No group work teaching strategies such as Jigsaw or pre-coaching were utilised in the period in which students were working in these groups and students were not encouraged to learn or interact in specific ways within their groups to limit alternative influences on student opinion. The intervention was implemented with two classes and student opinion was evaluated using a sequence of questionnaires. Interviews were also utilised to further analyse and evaluate student opinion on group work. The findings suggested this intervention had an impact on student opinion but to ensure a positive impact additional teaching and learning strategies should also be undertaken.
The role of technology in the assessment of RE
Keywords: MLT
Religious Education
MLT2017

A teacher has many aims, among them; they want a classroom where pupils are engaged in their learning and to have an easy and efficient way of measuring that learning. Aims such as these are also necessary for the teacher to have a safe and comfortable work environment, in which there is a reduction in workload.
There is no manual of how to achieve this and if there were, it would likely have moderate application outside of the school environment in which it was created. This research aims to select some of the key themes that arise in trying to achieve effective means of assessing pupils’ understanding in RE as well as reducing the impact of excessive workloads upon teachers. The research will take place within my own school and therefore the findings will be applicable to others who teach in my school. It is anticipated that the findings will also be applicable to those who teach other subjects and in other schools.
Examining the impact of positive feedback on student motivation
Keywords: MLT2017
MLT

A significant body of educational research identifies intrinsic motivation as a significant factor in education with the capacity to improve outcomes for students. Motivation not only appears significant but also pliable. The use of praise has been explored to augment intrinsic motivation and a number of investigations suggest promise for process, outcome and effort praise. Many of these investigations, however, focus on short-term interventions and few aim to elicit the cognitive processes that underpin motivation and behavioural change. This work gives a full account of current motivational and praise literature, and seeks to investigate the implementation of praise types above within a long-term, classroom-based action research project. Praise interventions had a duration of one term and were administered to two year-9 classes (English and science) in an independent secondary school in the UK. A mixed method constructivist methodology is adopted comprising of the Motivated Student Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and a mixture of semi-structured and unstructured interviews. MSLQ responses failed to demonstrate significant change in motivation across any of the praise types. Interview discussions, however, highlight that students appear to have the capacity to be metacognitive regarding motivation and perceive significant value for process praise. The value attributed to process praise appears contingent on the perception of improved outcomes or progress.
Doing the self: an ethnographic analysis of the quantified self
Keywords: Quantified Self
Ethnography
Science and Technology Studies

'Wearables' and 'self-quantifying technologies' are becoming ever more popular and normalised in society as a means of 'knowing' the self. How are these technologies implicated in this endeavour? Using insights from a four year multi-sited ethnography of the 'Quantified Self', I explore how the self is 'done' in the context of using technologies that purport to quantify the self in some way. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) sensibilities, I conduct a four- pronged investigation into 'self-making' by drawing upon, and expanding, existing theories of agency and performativity, number, data-visualisation, and enactment.
I find that self-quantifying technologies are productive in the doing of the self and are implicated in the process of making boundaries around that which comes to be known as the 'self' in a particular moment. The numbers and visualisations that result from practices of self-quantification enable a new way of 'seeing' the self, and provide a way of communicating this self with others. The self is thus not a pre-existing entity that simply requires these technologies as a means to 'know' it. Rather, the self is constantly being done with these technologies and within the surrounding practices of self-quantification.
In order to highlight the different parts of this process, I proffer the term 'entractment'. This term explains how these different elements come together to culminate in the production of a momentarily constant self in a particular context. It is a way of simultaneously encapsulating the processes of intra-action, extra-action and enactment with/in a community. In sum, it captures the conclusion that, in the context of self-quantification, we must understand the self as a collective enactment, achieved, at least in part, through the use of self-quantifying technologies that produce numerical data which facilitate visualisations that are imperative to the doing of the self.
Characterisation of the high strain rate deformation behaviour of α-β titanium alloys at near-transus temperature
Keywords: Deformation texture
Titanium Alloys
EBSD
High strain rate deformation
Split-Hopkinson Pressure Bar

The aim of this thesis is to provide microstructural and mechanical characterisation of α-β titanium alloys exposed to a range of thermo-mechanical conditions, in particular under-going high rate deformation at elevated temperatures, representative of the Linear Friction Welding (LFW) manufacturing process. Three α-β titanium alloys provided by Rolls-Royce are studied: Ti-64 blade, disc and Ti-6246 disc. Ti-64 and Ti-6246 show complex deformation behaviour with strain, strain rate and temperature, especially near the transus temperature, where the low temperature α phase is transformed into the high temperature β phase. The microstructure and mechanical properties evolve in an interconnected fashion, and understanding this mutual influence is necessary to better predict the behaviour of these alloys.
Characterisation of the mechanical properties was performed through uniaxial compression tests at strain rates from 0.001 to 3000 s-1, using an Instron screw-driven machine at quasi-static rates, a servo-hydraulic machine at medium rates and a Split-Hopkinson Pressure Bar and a drop-weight tower at high strain rates. The tests were performed over a range of temperatures from room temperature to 1300 °C. The main focus was on high strain rate and high temperature tests, with the development of a gravity driven direct impact Hopkinson bar, referred as a drop-weight system, which is intended to evaluate the mechanical response of metals to high strain rate loading at temperatures up to c. 1300 °C. The design and principles of operation of the system are presented, along with calibration and validation data.
Preliminary tests were performed on stock Ti-64, heated at two rates: 1 and 20 °C s-1. The evolution of the mechanical properties was analysed, focussing on the strain rate, temperature and phases dependencies.
Characterisation of the microstructure was realised by performing interrupted compression tests, first at room temperature, three plastic strains, 4%, 10% and 20%, and two different strain rates, 0.001 and 2000 s-1; then at 4% plastic strain, a strain rate of 2000 s-1 and three elevated temperatures, 700, 900 and 1100 °C. A better understanding of the microstructure evolution with strain, strain rates and temperature, including the macrotexture and microtexture of the specimens, was obtained using Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) to characterise the texture of the undeformed and deformed materials.
The better understanding of the flow stress and microstructural evolution of both Ti-64 and its individual α and β phases with various strain rates and temperatures is intended to be used in the development of more accurate models representing the behaviour of these alloys. Predicting the microstructure evolution and then the mechanical properties of a material is essential to optimise the final mechanical properties of the alloys when welded by manufacturing processes such as the LFW process.
Gentlemen of leisure or vital professionals? The officer establishment of the British army, 1689-1739
Keywords: Eighteenth Century
Army administration
British Army
Military Experience
Professionalization

This thesis argues that the officer establishment of the British Army experienced considerable professional, administrative and social change from its expansion in 1689 to the outbreak of war in 1739. In the intervening fifty year period, the British army and the officers who led it experienced alternate periods of prolonged war and peace. This led to the retention and dissemination of administrative practices, gentlemanly behaviours and professional competencies that enabled officers to remain motivated and dedicated to military service, despite multiple factors that hindered their ambitions and reduced their career prospects. This development was not a series of comprehensive reforms, but rather ad hoc measures which took effect through the efforts of commanding officers, the will of the monarch and the administrative power of the War Office. These changes occurred within the existing military system, stretching its capacity to satisfy multiple interests to its limit, and resulting in the prioritisation of certain consideration over others. Using a greater quantity and range of archival material than previous historiography, the thesis adopts several historical approaches towards their interpretation, from institutional and military history, to cultural and political history. This offers new perspectives and in-depth analysis to challenge some arguments made about army officers during this period, and refinements to others. It contributes to our understanding of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century army by rethinking the martial ethos of the officer establishment, and its impact on the officer establishment’s capabilities, behaviour and relationship with the crown.
Representing the dynasty in Flavian Rome: the case of Josephus' "Jewish War"
Keywords: Roman historiography
Flavian dynasty
Josephus

This thesis investigates the problem of contemporary historiography and regime representation in Flavian Rome through a close study of a text not usually read for such purposes but which has obvious promise for a study of this theme, the Jewish War of Flavius Josephus. Having surveyed the evolution of our conception of Josephus’ relationship to Flavian power, taken a broad account of issues of political expression and regime representation in Flavian Rome outside Josephus and examined questions relating to the structure and date of the work, I will provide a series of thematically-focused readings of the three senior members of the Flavian family, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, as represented by their contemporary and client Josephus. Key topics to be explored include the level of independence of Josephus’ vision, his work’s relationship to how the regime is depicted in other contemporary sources, how Josephus makes the Flavians serve his own agenda (which is distinct from the heavy focus of most previous scholarship on how Josephus served their agenda), and the viability and usefulness of certain types of reading practices relating to figured critique which have recently become influential in Josephan scholarship. The thesis offers a new approach to Josephus’ relationship to the Flavian Dynasty and sheds new light on contemporary historiography and political expression in the Early Principate.
Reading the gallery: portraits and texts in the mid- to late nineteenth century
Keywords: Portraiture
Vernon Lee
Decadent
Gallery
Museum
Photography
Thomas Hardy
Walter Pater
Collecting
Edmund Gosse
National Portrait Gallery

The Victorians saw more portraits than any generation before them. While the eighteenth century has been named 'the age of portraiture', portraits pervaded nineteenth-century society like never before. With the invention of photography, coupled with technological advancements in low-cost printing methods, the medium in which faces could be recorded was revolutionised, the classes of society that could afford to be immortalised expanded, and the spaces in which portraits were seen proliferated. These spaces included the public gallery, photography studio shop windows, and personal photograph albums. They also included the art periodical, biography, fiction, and poetry as the experience of portraiture became distinctly textual as well as visual.
This thesis draws upon art history alongside literary, museum, and material studies to explore the creative exchange that developed between portrait viewership and reading practices in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Taking the establishment of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 as its starting point, the thesis tracks the changing idea of the portrait gallery through its literary reception. It takes the portrait gallery to mean the physical space in which portraits were exhibited, and the conceptual idea of collecting, arranging, and interacting with portraits that permeated into the literary world. By focussing on the work of Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Vernon Lee, the thesis forms a 'gallery' of nineteenth-century tastemakers, each of whom looked to the democratic art of portraiture to reflect upon their literary art.
How did portraits and texts interact in the mid- to late nineteenth century? In what ways did writers adapt the conventions of portraiture and the portrait gallery for the written text? This thesis seeks to answer these questions and provide new narratives about the complex relationship between the visual and the verbal in nineteenth-century culture. It observes the Victorian 'culture of art' with a more focussed eye to illuminate how the conditions of viewing, circulating, and collecting portraits specific to the period allowed the portrait gallery to serve as a particularly compelling arena for the literary imagination. Gosse, Pater, Hardy, and Lee tested the inherent limitations of portraiture as an art of imitation to realise its imaginative capacity for communicating with close and distant, contemporary and historic figures. They recognised that writing offered a valuable way of constructing the affective conversations that could be had with – and the stories that could be told about – portraits and portrait collections. With the proliferation of portraits came the problem and the opportunity of organising them.
The Okeovers c.1100 - c.1300: a gentry family and their cartulary
Keywords: Landholdings
Staffordshire
Cartulary
Gentry
Derbyshire
Social
Economic

This thesis studies the history of a family whose later generations were to become quintessential members of the gentry and how they managed their lands and lives. It is based on the early-fourteenth century cartulary left by Sir Roger of Okeover. The cartulary was probably motivated by Roger’s childhood experience of the disputes over the wardship of himself and his lands. The cartulary is supplemented by cognate sources including the cartulary of the Abbey of Burton upon Trent and original documents. These provide an exceptional record stretching back to the early twelfth century and beyond. Chapter 3 argues that the origins of the Okeovers and their occupation of the manor of Okeover, held from the Anglo-Saxon Abbey of Burton, probably predate the Conquest. The Okeovers held lands from several individuals and institutions. Most of the land probably had origins before the Conquest and was held on a basis that later came to be categorised as socage tenure. This differs from land held by military service, a tenurial practice probably introduced by the Normans. This distinction was particularly important in cases of wardship. Chapter 4 shows that the Okeover’s vertical social relationships with local magnates, particularly the Ferrers of Tutbury Castle, varied with the strength of the head of the Ferrers family at the time. Chapter 5 argues that the obligation to pay services in cash and to generate a cash income increased the relative independence of the family. Chapter 6 shows that support of younger siblings was an important objective resulting in horizontal alliances with other local families. Chapter 7 examines the problems of financial over-extension the family faced. This history of the Okeovers makes no claim to have produced results that necessarily apply more generally. It does, however, suggest that it would be productive to undertake further research into early twelfth-century deeds distinguishing tenures by socage from those by military service.
The genetic regulation and subcellular dynamics of secretory and endolysosomal organelles of Drosophila secondary cells.
Keywords: 3D Structured Illumination Microscopy
Trafficking
Electron Microscopy
Endosome
Exosome
Rab GTPase
Fluorescence Microscopy
Lysosome
Secretion
Dense-Core Granule

Secretory processes underpin the emergence of cellular diversity in complex multicellular organisms. However, our understanding of the basic mechanisms controlling the different secretory and endosomal compartments involved remains surprisingly incomplete. During my DPhil I have studied a specialised epithelial cell type in the male Drosophila accessory glands, the secondary cell, which contains unusually large intracellular compartments that are accessible to detailed morphological study. I characterise the organisation, ultrastructure and molecular composition of this cell’s secretory and endosomal compartments, and I employ specific Rab GTPases, conserved coordinators of membrane trafficking and identity, to define multiple compartmental subtypes.
By developing super-resolution and time-lapse microscopy approaches in these cells, I show that numerous intraluminal vesicles (ILVs) are formed within Rab11-labelled secretory compartments and released into the accessory gland lumen as exosomes, the first clear demonstration in eukaryotic cells of exosome biogenesis within a non-late endosomal compartment. Biogenesis of these ILVs is dependent on evolutionarily conserved Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport (ESCRT) 0-III genes and involves loading of compartment-specific cargoes. Work by others, some in collaboration with me, has shown that these novel mechanisms are conserved in human cells.
I show that dense-core granules, the structures employed to package proteins and other molecules destined for regulated secretion, form within large non-cored Rab6- positive compartments, in a process that seems to involve inputs from both the Golgi and recycling endosomal pathways. Further analysis has revealed roles for specific Rabs, for ILVs, and for the conserved fibrillar protein Mfas/TGFBI in different aspects of DCG formation. I also show that DCGs are not only secreted, but can also be degraded by fusion to acidic endosomal compartments. Remarkably, there is evidence that mammalian cells may employ all of these mechanisms and defects in these processes may be linked to diseases like cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders.
Hence my work has established a new system to study complex secretory mechanisms, which can now be developed to model specific disease processes in the future.
In summary, I have discovered several novel cell biological mechanisms controlling exosome biology, dense-core granule biogenesis, regulated secretion, and endolysosomal trafficking. Some of these already appear relevant to human health and disease, suggesting that the secondary cell system has considerable further potential for unravelling the fundamental processes underlying eukaryotic secretion in the future.
Uniqueness results for viscous incompressible fluids
Keywords: Weak-Strong Uniqueness
Analysis of PDEs
Harmonic Analysis
Regularity Theory
Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations

First, we provide new classes of initial data, that grant short time uniqueness of the associated weak Leray-Hopf solutions of the three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations. The main novelty here is the establishment of certain continuity properties near the initial time, for weak Leray-Hopf solutions with initial data in supercritical Besov spaces. The techniques used here build upon related ideas of Calderón.
Secondly, we prove local regularity up to the at part of the boundary, for certain classes of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations, provided that the velocity field belongs to L∞(-1; 0; L3, β(B(1) &xcap; &Ropf;3 +)) with 3 ≤ β < ∞. What enables us to build upon the work of Escauriaza, Seregin and Šverák [27] and Seregin [100] is the establishment of new scale-invariant estimates, new estimates for the pressure near the boundary and a convenient new &epsiv;-regularity criterion.
Third, we show that if a weak Leray-Hopf solution in &Ropf;3 +×]0,∞[ has a finite blow-up time T, then necessarily limt↑T&verbar;&verbar;v(·, t)&verbar;&verbar;L3,β(&Ropf;3 +) = ∞ with 3 < β < ∞. The proof hinges on a rescaling procedure from Seregin's work [106], a new stability result for singular points on the boundary, suitable a priori estimates and a Liouville type theorem for parabolic operators developed by Escauriaza, Seregin and Šverák [27].
Finally, we investigate a notion of global-in-time solutions to the Navier- Stokes equations in &Ropf;3, with solenoidal initial data in the critical Besov space Ḃ-1/44,∞(&Ropf;3), which has certain continuity properties with respect to weak&ast; convergence of the initial data. Such properties are motivated by the strategy used by Seregin [106] to show that if a weak Leray-Hopf solution in &Ropf;3×]0,∞[ has a finite blow-up time T, then necessarily limt↑T &verbar;&verbar;v(·, t)&verbar;&verbar;L3(&Ropf;3) = ∞. We prove new decomposition results for Besov spaces, which are key in the conception and existence theory of such solutions.