An enquiry into predictability of teaching practice marks, with special reference to those awarded to students attending a college of education

The study is in three parts. Part One looks at background. It briefly covers historical concepts of education; it goes on to look at the people who enter teaching and why they have chosen it as a career. Lastly part one looks at the hurdles they have to negotiate before being offered a place a college of education. Part Two looks at some of the variables which affect student teaching performance – personality, flexibility and how these have been shown to relate to measured teaching performance. It also looks at those variables external to the student which research has shown are likely to affect the marks a student will get for teaching practice. Finally section two looks at the relationship between teaching practice performance and future performance as a qualified teacher. Part Three is the empirical research. Five year groups of students already in colleges of education and one further group interviewed for a place at Bede College, Durham, constitute the research sample. Measures of academic performance, interview grades, I.Q. and flexibility scores were used as predictors of student teaching marks. Consistently the I.Q. score and flexibility score in multiple battery produced the best first order multiple prediction of teaching practice marks. Also consistently, G.C.E. and Interview grades produced the worst multiple prediction of teaching practice marks. The test of flexibility was shown by multiple regression analysis to consistently provide the significant predictive contribution to those multiple batteries in which it was present. The women students obtained very significantly higher scores on the test of flexibility than did the men students. One unexpected finding was that students who would have preferred to go to university were regarded as significantly poorer ' classroom performers than the rest. The appendices deal with the various predictors used in the empirical study, in particular with the development of the test of flexibility. The hypothesis that a test of verbal flexibility would predict the marks awarded to students for their teaching practice performance was accepted

Measurement of long-range steric repulsions between microspheres due to an adsorbed polymer

We have measured the interparticle potential between pairs of micron-sized silica spheres induced by adsorbed polyethylene oxide polymer using a line-scanned optical tweezer. We found this long-range steric repulsion to be exponential over the range of energies (0.1kBT–5kBT) and polymer molecular weights (452 000–1 580 000) studied, and that the potential scaled with the polymer’s radius of gyration RG. The potential’s exponential decay length was about 0.6RG and its range was about 4RG, although both parameters varied significantly from one pair of spheres to another. The potential’s exponential prefactor was greater than mean-field predictions

Exploring canyons in glassy energy landscapes using metadynamics

The complex physics of glass forming systems is controlled by the structure of the low energy portions of their potential energy landscapes. Here, we report that a modified metadynamics algorithm efficiently explores and samples low energy regions of such high-dimensional landscapes. In the energy landscape for a model foam, metadynamics finds and descends meandering `canyons' in the landscape, which contain dense clusters of energy minima along their floors. Similar canyon structures in the energy landscapes of two model glass formers--hard sphere fluids and the Kob-Andersen glass--allow metadynamics to reach low energies. In the hard sphere system, fluid configurations are found to form continuous regions that cover the canyon floors, but only up to a volume fraction close to that predicted for kinetic arrest. For the Kob-Andersen glass former, metadynamics reaches the canyons' ends with modest computational effort; with the lowest energies found approaching the predicted Kauzmann limit.Comment: 7 pages and 5 figures, plus appendice

Fluid Mechanical and Electrical Fluctuation Forces in Colloids

Fluctuations in fluid velocity and fluctuations in electric fields may both give rise to forces acting on small particles in colloidal suspensions. Such forces in part determine the thermodynamic stability of the colloid. At the classical statistical thermodynamic level, the fluid velocity and electric field contributions to the forces are comparable in magnitude. When quantum fluctuation effects are taken into account, the electric fluctuation induced van der Waals forces dominate those induced by purely fluid mechanical motions. The physical principles are applied in detail for the case of colloidal particle attraction to the walls of the suspension container and more briefly for the case of forces between colloidal particles.Comment: ReVTeX format, one *.eps figur

Advanced manufacturing development of a composite empennage component for L-1011 aircraft. Phase 2: Design and analysis

The composite fin design consists of two one-piece cocured covers, two one-piece cocured spars and eleven ribs. The lower ribs are truss ribs with graphite/epoxy caps and aluminum truss members. The upper three ribs are a sandwich design with graphite/epoxy face sheets and a syntactic epoxy core. The design achieves a 27% weight saving compared to the metal box. The fastener count has been reduced from over 40,000 to less than 7000. The structural integrity of the composite fin was verified by analysis and test. The static, fail-safe and flutter analyses were completed. An extensive test program has established the material behavior under a range of conditions and critical subcomponents were tested to verify the structural concepts