VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
To what extent could a literature-based approach to character education improve pupil understanding of virtue
Keywords: MLT
MLT2020

This is the presentation of a proposed study into the role of literature as an aid to develop character for secondary school children. Building on existing research this study expects that the literature will have a positive effect in providing valuable material for research into character development. The Background Character education as a field within educational research became popular in the mid-twentieth century. With the rise of positive psychology at the beginning of the twenty-first century there has been renewed interest in the area. Within the United Kingdom there have been two main centres of study into character: The Jubilee Centre, at the University of Birmingham and the Narnian Project, at the University of Leeds. These two centres have recently taken to the study of fictional literature as a resource to help with the development of virtue within children. The basis of using literature has long been a rich source of inspiration within religious communities and so this study, being held within the context of a Christian school, aims to add to these studies. Method The innovation of this study is in three parts: biography, diversity, and measurement. The study exclusively uses biographies as the basis of the literature as this sits within the historical culture of the school. The selection of the material aims to be inclusive of gender and cultural background so as to provide approachable role models to the pupils. This study also argues that a Life History approach can provide an alternative and rich source to data collection. The proposal of Life History is not a suggestion that it is a better approach than that of previous studies. The use of self-reporting, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, have all had success. This study proposes the Life History approach as a supplementary method of understanding the success of literature-based models of character development. In this way this study is successful in developing this important field in educational research. Findings This study was unable to collect data due to the situation with COVID-19 and the lockdown of schools. However, using the findings of the two studies above and a wealth of literature in the field this study lays out clear hypotheses and methodology to demonstrate the value of such an approach to the existent literature.
Thomas Buckingham : a critical edition with commentary of the first question of the Questiones super Sententias
Keywords: Manuscripts
commentary
critical edition
Oxford
Questiones super Sententias
De contingentia futurorum
Thomas Buckingham
England
Theologians

Rather more information is currently available about the life and works of Thomas of Buckingham than there was only a few decades ago, when L'Abbé A,.de Poorter, describing a manuscript containing Buckingham's Questiones super Sententias, was limited to saying: "Buckingham is the author of the second piece: the questions reproduced in folios 45 to 79 belong to his Commentary on the Sentences of which there exists one specimen at Florence (Laurenz.) and another at Paris (Bibl. Nat.). We owe this information to the kindness of R.P. Pelster, S.J., who promises us more ample information about Buckingham.” That it is now possible to write a reasonably full biography - albeit one subject to certain limitations - is due to the considerable work of Michalski, Chenu, Emden, Pantin, Robson and Weisheipl, among others. They have brought to light a body of materials for his life which may be regarded as exhaustive, at least insofar as all likely - and many unlikely - sources of information have been consulted. Some of these items have been published, but the majority are known only in brief references.
Since, in common with most of his mediaeval contemporaries, Thomas of Buckingham has left the modern biographer a fragmentary corpus of materials from which to reconstruct his life, it is the nature of the materials themselves which justifies further attempts at reconstruction. As Robson has said of the materials for the life of Wyclif: "...the certain and authoritative sources for these years are so few and so stark that they permit, and even encourage, an assessment de novo." What is true of Wyclif, who has not lacked biographers, is at least equally true of Buckingham, for whose life the sources are even more limited and no less ambiguous, but who has received far less critical attention. But, if it is the fragmentary nature of the materials which prompts this enterprise, it follows that interpretation must be both careful and open; i.e. that a balanced assessment of the conclusions and inferences which may be drawn from the primary materials must be presented, with clear distinctions drawn between the information actually given and the conjectural links.
Continued in thesis ...
A hydro-socio-legal conception of rights for water: addressing jurisprudential tensions to foster responsive legal regimes
Keywords: Socio-legal
Water law
Rights
Environmental law
Jurisprudence

In the space of ten years, a number of novel and unique legal developments have arisen in different jurisdictions around the world with one element in common: a declaration of the Rights of Nature, and a direct attribution of this jurisprudence to watercourses in their respective contexts. This thesis uses a hydro-socio-legal approach to analysing three of these developments as case-studies, identifying why they have occurred, the tensions involved, and the institutional and governance issues that they seek to address or are responding to. This work frames the analysis around an evaluation of environmental constitutionalism, and legal personhood, which informed their selection. This evaluation is prefaced by a prior discussion of key ideas in the theoretical discourse pertaining to the appropriate form of a right for non-human entities, and whether natural objects can have identifiable, and representable, interests. This work concludes that sufficient sophisticated recognition and processing of information about socio-hydrologies in respective contexts can innovate water law to enable responsive governance regimes, and the achievement of this depends on whether jurisdictions are prepared to open themselves to new approaches, legitimate stakeholder relationships with watercourses, and technological solutions that can enrich empirical understandings of fair resource allocation and utilisation for both nature and society.
Sticking with droplets: Mathematical models of capillary adhesion
Keywords: Capillary adhesion
Mathematical modelling
Elasto-capillarity
Fluid-structure interaction
Lubrication theory
Capillary forces
Surface tension
Microfluidics
Viscous flow

A small amount of liquid trapped between two solid surfaces can pull them together because of the effects of surface tension. This effect is called capillary adhesion, and is thought to be important in many small-scale scenarios, including helping insects to adhere. In this thesis, we study aspects of capillary adhesion using mathematical modelling.
We begin by considering whether the forces generated through capillary adhesion with a fixed volume of liquid can be enhanced by splitting a liquid bridge into many smaller bridges. By carefully calculating the bridge shape (and when bridges can span a given gap), capillary adhesion of rough surfaces is shown to be significantly enhanced compared to smooth surfaces. It is also shown that roughness may lead to a steady-state resistance to shear, which is compared quantitatively to experiments in insects.
Next, we turn to study solid-solid contact in the presence of capillary adhesion. Equilibria are found for impermeable and permeable elastic spheres in contact with a flat, rigid substrate. When saturated, a porous sphere can naturally secrete its own adhering liquid as its pore space is compressed by deformation. Numerical results and scaling laws are found to describe the equilibria with and without an applied force; results without a force are compared to experiments on hydrogel beads in contact.
We then investigate in more detail the effect of surface deformation on capillary adhesion through a model of a thin membrane under tension. Calculating the equilibrium adhesion forces shows that an increase in adhesion of more than an order of magnitude can be achieved compared to a comparable undeformable system; this is supported by experimental results. The dynamics of adhesion are investigated via a lubrication model. The slow drainage of a liquid-filled dimple explains why adhesion may not always be achieved in practice unless sufficient time is allowed to adhere. We also investigate how the deformability may be exploited to detach in a controllable manner.
Finally, we study how detachment occurs using a dynamic two-dimensional model of a loaded plate attached to a rigid substrate by a liquid bridge. Using a linear stability analysis, the motion of the plate is shown to decouple into two modes — separation and tilting — with the tilting mode growing fastest. As the plate tilts it may contact the substrate, depending on the width of the plate. We characterize how plate width and initial condition may determine whether a plate ultimately detaches or adheres and show that tilting may lead to anomalous detachment: plates that should stick, detach.
Ensuring readiness for delivering new qualifications: The perspective of college curriculum leaders in post-16 education in Wales
Keywords: MEA
MEA 2020

This study considers the impact upon curriculum leaders in further education colleges in Wales of the introduction of new, nationally mandated, vocational qualifications. Drawing upon the introduction of new, Wales-only, qualifications in the area of Health and Social Care and Childcare in 2019, the study sought the views of curriculum leaders about the impact that those qualifications had upon them and their work. Three key research questions are addressed:
A. What factors do college curriculum leaders take into account before, and when, new qualifications are introduced in Wales?
B. How have curriculum leaders, in further education colleges in Wales, been impacted in their role by the introduction of new qualifications in Health and Social Care in 2019?
C. How, potentially, might the qualifications regulator, awarding bodies, senior leaders and other relevant bodies in Wales improve upon past practice in relation to ensuring the manageability, for further education colleges in Wales, of the second phase of qualification reform in 2021?
The research to underpin the study took place in late May and June 2020 and consisted of hour-long interviews with senior curriculum leaders from eight of the twelve further education colleges in Wales.
The key findings of the study are that it is essential for policy makers and qualification developers to engage with, and understand the needs of, the institutions who will be delivering the qualifications to learners, at a strategic and operational level rather than, solely, at a subject level. Nine key factors are identified as being of importance to curriculum leaders and clarification is provided about the timescales which need to be followed in order to underpin successful implementation. Lessons learned from the implementation of the first suite of vocational qualifications to be reformed under the aegis of the qualifications’ regulator for Wales since its establishment in 2015 are identified in time for improvements in the implementation phase of the second major suite.
The study occurred during the height of the COVID19 pandemic of 2020 and, as such, introduces an additional dimension to the consideration of the manageability of assessment in the context of a highly unusual set of circumstances and the lessons that might be learned from these.
On the comparability of different programming language routes through A-level Computer Science
Keywords: MEA 2020
MEA

Fairness in assessment is as important as validity and reliability. When question or paper choice is used in an assessment it is important that the various routes are comparable so that fairness to all students is maintained. Previous literature on question choice suggests that offering choice often leads to significant differences in exam performance by route, sometimes by several marks. This dissertation compares the five possible routes through a Computer Science A-level assessment. One paper was responded to using a choice of five different programming languages and it was possible that not all languages were equally accessible to students or equally applicable to the exam paper tasks. Test bias was evaluated using recently developed IRT-based differential test functioning procedures that were developed to assess unfairness due to demographic characteristics. These enabled a detailed test-level, sub-section, and item-level analysis at various levels of student ability. Some small differences between two routes were found but overall, the assessment behaved in a fair and equitable manner. It is likely that this was achieved through careful question design and the strict application of a common paper and generic mark scheme. It is recommended that the performance of the programming paper is monitored in future exam series.
A few anomalies observed in the data suggested the possibility that classroom experience might have had more of an impact on students’ performances than programming language choice. This suggests that there is a need for research targeted at better understanding how teachers are preparing their students for the exam, and how the students are approaching the paper.
While choice has not led to unfairness in this analysis, concerns around the use of choice in assessment remain. Further research is proposed to look at the impact of choice on exam fairness in a broader selection of subjects that do not use generic questions or mark schemes. In addition, research is suggested to better understand student and teacher attitudes to the pros and cons of offering choice in assessment.
Finally, it is suggested that as students are judged on their overall test scores, rather than their item scores, test fairness should be analysed at test level, rather than item level as is common practice. The use of differential test functioning analysis is recommended for any assessment where concerns of unfairness towards a sub-group of students exist.
Frictional half-plane contacts in partial slip in the steady-state
Keywords: partial slip
friction
fretting
metal fatigue

This thesis aims to understand how a number of real contact problems respond to local contact loads during cyclic loading and which combination of loads will give rise to a state of partial slip. At the core of this thesis lies a family of partial slip solutions for half-plane contact problems subject to different forms of periodic loading. This collection of partial slip solutions allows engineers and researchers alike to assess rapidly the contact behaviour, namely the position and extent of the zones of relative cyclic motion along the interface. While knowing the slip stick pattern, by itself, does not answer the question of whether an assembly is prone to fretting fatigue or not, it enables the user to set up simple laboratory experiments in order to determine the fretting fatigue strength of the design under consideration.
The thesis begins with a taxonomy of the different classes of contacts that can arise in mechanical assemblies. In many fretting fatigue problems, we encounter one particular contact class, the so-called incomplete contact, which is suited for being represented by half-planes. After exploring the properties and limitations of plane elasticity and half-plane theory, we look at half-plane partial slip contact problems under different types of loading. We will make use of three different solution approaches (a) an analytical description using a superposition of full sliding shear tractions, (b) an analytical description using glide dislocations starting from a fully adhered state, and (c) an asymptotic description of the contact edge behaviour. Where suitable, the research results are applied to example geometries in order to familiarise the reader with the methodologies presented. The thesis concludes with the proposal of a generalised approach to fretting fatigue strength utilising experimental results published in the literature. The test data is reinterpreted by applying the outlined asymptotic methods in order to provide generality and comparability across different geometries and loading scenarios.
An analysis and interpretation of the life, writings and philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Keywords: life
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King
philosophy
writings
Civil rights

This study is a four chapter analysis and interpretation of the life, writings and philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapter I places it in proper historical and philosophical perspective with a review of the existing body of literature on King, a critical summary of its three types of analysis and interpretations of his life and work and an exposition and defense of the thesis underlying this work. Chapter II then provides an account of King the man, minister and political activist. Chapter III explains the intrinsic unity and fundamental tenets of his basic religious, metaphysical, moral and socio-political thinking. And Chapter IV conducts a systematic textual exegesis of his 25 key ideas and demonstrates how to read, analyse, explain and interpret his philosophy properly through a combined dictionary/concordance and syntopicon of his writings and speeches. Ultimately, the need, originality and contribution of this entire enterprise lies in the fact that it contains the most balanced and comprehensive analysis of King's life and the only published exposition of his complete philosophy, commentary on his collected writings and valid explanation of how his life, writings and philosophy should be read and interpreted as a whole.
Lessons from the front line : post qualification training for social workers
Keywords: training
social workers
Britain
Child care

Several recent high profile cases (including the tragic death of Victoria Climbie) have highlighted perceived failures of child protection services. Post qualification training programmes have been introduced to provide front line social workers with contemporary specialised knowledge and skills in this complex field.
This project follows a cohort of 36 child protection social workers (and their line managers) over eighteen months while they undertook the Post Qualification Child Care Award for England and Wales.
A mixed methods, repeated measures, programme evaluation explored both the effectiveness and the impact of the training. Ipsative (self-referencing) evaluation data was triangulated against line manager, academic tutor and practice assessor evaluations. An action research philosophy ensured that formative findings were provided concurrently to the programme providers to effect timely redesign and remediation.
Statistically significant increases in candidates’ levels of competency were demonstrated at the conclusion of the programme and at six months post-programme, suggesting both programme efficacy and effectiveness. An inexpensive user-friendly methodology for quantifying and measuring the acquisition of competency is presented.
In general, respondents were enthusiastic about what they had learned and all respondents agreed that the programme improved standards for childcare work. Despite qualitative feedback expressing dissatisfaction with the delivery model, the candidates’ levels of enthusiasm for the programme decreased only slightly over the course, whilst line managers’ level of enthusiasm increased.
Ninety percent of candidates reported stress associated with the combined pressures of work and the programme, yet their quantitative distress levels at the end of the program were actually lower than at the beginning. A number of adverse effects were identified. The conflict between the qualitative and quantitative findings is explored.
The programme was further evaluated by means of a unique international comparison contrasting it to a parallel Canadian post-qualification educational programme.
The result is a series of LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINE, which have implications for the design and delivery of post-qualification training programmes for social workers, as well as other front line service delivery professionals.
The place of the Macarian writings in the Eastern Christian tradition to AD 700
Keywords: Christian literature
Macarian
Pseudo-Macarius
Orthodox Eastern Church

This thesis represents an assessment the place of the Macarian writings within the Eastern Christian tradition during the first three hundred years of their circulation. Part I (Chapters 1-4) is essentially introductory, beginning with an account of the manuscript tradition, the date and location of the (anonymous) author, and his relation to the Messalian tendency. I argue that the Macarian element within the anti-Messalian lists constitutes an additional layer of material drawn from the Macariana because of its superficial affinities with the primary layer of the anti-Messalian lists and on at least one point inconsistent with that layer. In order to emphasise the patently moderating and reforming character of the Macarian writings within the amorphous Messalian tendency, I underline the association between Macarius-Symeon and the Cappadocian Fathers. As a further prelude to the study of the Macarian legacy, I attempt a revision of the dichotomy conventionally posited of Macarius-Symeon and Evagrius of Pontus.
Part II (Chapters 5-8) constitutes the main body of the thesis, an examination of the relations obtaining between the Macariana and the works of Mark the Monk, Diadochus of Photice, Abba Isaiah and Maximus the Confessor. In Mark, I demonstrate not only the palpable reliance of that author upon Macarius-Symeon but also the important clarifications and revisions Mark offers of his predecessor’s teachings. In Diadochus, the influence of Macarius-Symeon is even more profound, but again we see the same pattern of reliance and constructive criticism. The fact that both Mark and Diadochus are generally held to be anti-Messalian writers confirms the fundamentally anti-Messalian character of the Macarian writings. The Asceticon of Abba Isaiah also relies to a significant degree upon the Macariana, although here the Macarian element appears to belong to a second redactional layer. Lastly, this thesis demonstrates the direct and indirect influence of the Macarian writings upon Maximus the Confessor and their key role within his work of theological and spiritual synthesis.