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A current educational practice in grouping students is looping. Looping involves teachers remaining with the same students for two or more years. This practice was implemented in the elementary school in this study. This is an evaluation of looping in the first and second grades. The study has both qualitative and quantitative components. An administrator, teachers, and students in four looping and four non-looping cohorts were participants. Criterion variables were attendance; achievement in English, mathematics, science, and history and social science; instructional time; relationships among students; and relationships between teachers and students. A t-test was used to test for differences between looping and non-looping cohorts for attendance and achievement. Teachers used a log to record instructional time spent reviewing previously learned skills and teaching new skills in mathematics. Observations were conducted to describe the relationships among students and between teachers and students. There were no differences between looping and non-looping cohorts in attendance, instructional time, and achievement, except in history and social science, for one of the years studied. In that year, students in the looping cohort scored higher on the Standards of Learning test in history and social science than students in the non-looping cohort. Relationships among students were better in looping cohorts, and relationships between teachers and students appeared stronger in non-looping cohorts. / Ed. D.

Conservation is today often interpreted as the preservation of a still-shot, an understanding informed by the belief that by displaying photographic memory of the past, it is possible to gain access to it. Naturalistic representation is unequivocal and presents the onlooker with a single meaning. The dominance of the photorealistic image as model for memory, should be challenged by undermining the notion that architectural representation is a portrayal of likeness, restoring its full potential as an iconic representation of presence. A micro-historical study of the Renaissance concept of restoration, focused on Tiberio Alfarano's 1571 ichnography of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, offers an alternative paradigm in order to inform, critically, contemporary theory and the practice of the renewal of mnemic buildings. The hybrid drawing (1571) extends beyond the opera of graphic architecture, realizing a real effigy. Alfarano factured a track-drawing, providing memory traces on the drawing-site, which, acting like a veil, bear marks of the building's presence within time. The ichnography makes visible a "hallowed configuration", conceived as a substratum for the imagination of conservation. This defines a collective daydreaming strategy, from which multiple authors can imagine possible futures. Ambiguity and polysemy inform the drawing, generating an equivocal space where unforeseeable inventions occur by the process of future predictions by recollecting memories. This invites merging multiple stories. Grasping the significance of Alfarano's drawing, one begins to comprehend the mistaken belief in the primacy of photo rendering to access a building and conserve its essence. Any essence cannot be achieved through exact visual reconstruction, rather through a chiasmus of past and present form, expressing allegoric significance. The retrospective and prospective character of the architectural-conservation process can be experienced through the intermediacy of hybrid-drawings directing the gaze simultaneously in two directions; a pre-existent condition engages in dialogue with future design. This is a condition absent from today's practice, where measured drawings and design drawings are often kept separate. Seen this way, architectural drawings could rejoin these two temporal conditions, through metaphoric or literal transparency, and allow for a real transformation within continuity of identity. / Ph. D.

In this dissertation, adaptive predictive feedback control is used to suppress plate vibrations. The adaptive predictive controller consists of an on-line identification technique coupled with a control scheme. Various system identification techniques are investigated and implemented including batch least squares, projection algorithm, and recursive least squares. The control algorithms used include Generalized Predictive Control and Deadbeat Predictive Control. This dissertation combines system identification and control to regulate broadband disturbances in modally-dense structures. As it is assumed that the system to be regulated is unknown or time varying, the control schemes presented in this work have the ability to identify and regulate a plant with only an initial estimate of the system order. In addition, theoretical development and experimental results presented in this work confirm the fact that an adaptive controller operating in the presence of disturbances will automatically incorporate an internal noise model of the disturbance perturbing the plant if the system model order is chosen sufficiently large. It is also shown that the adaptive controller has the ability to track changes in the disturbance spectrum as well as track a time varying plant under certain conditions. This work presents a broadband multi-input multi-output control scheme which utilizes both the DSP processor and the PC processor in order to handle the computational demand of broadband regulation of a modally-dense plant. Also, the system identification technique and the control algorithm may be combined to produce a direct adaptive control scheme which estimates the control parameters directly from input and output data. Experimental results for various control techniques are presented using an acoustic plant, a rectangular plate with clamped boundary conditions, and a time varying plate. / Ph. D.

Over the past two decades, Lean Production has begun to replace traditional manufacturing techniques around the world, mainly due to the success of the Toyota Motor Company. One key to Toyota's success that many American companies have not been able to emulate is the transformation of their suppliers to the lean philosophy. This lack of supplier transformation in America is due to a variety of reasons including differences in supplier proximity, supplier relationships, supplier performance levels, and the ordering policies used for supplied parts. The focus of this research is analyzing the impact of ordering policies for supplied parts of a manufacturing cell utilizing Lean Production techniques. This thesis presents a simulation analysis of a multi-stage, lean manufacturing cell that produces a family of products. The analysis investigates how the ordering policy for supplied parts affects the performance of the cell under conditions of demand variability and imperfect supplier performance. The ordering policies evaluated are a periodic-review inventory control policy (s, S) and two kanban policies. The performance of the cell is measured by the flowtime of the product through the cell, the on-time-delivery to their customer, the number of products shipped each week, the amount of work-in-process inventory in the cell, the approximate percentage of time the cell was stocked out, and the average supplied part inventory levels for the cell. Using this simulation model, an experimental analysis is conducted using an augmented central composite design. Then, a multivariate analysis is performed on the results of the experiments. The results obtained from this study suggest that the preferred ordering policy for supplied parts is the (s, S) inventory policy for most levels of the other three factors and most of the performance measures. This policy, however, results in increased levels of supplied part inventory, which is the primary reason for the high performance for most response variables. This increased inventory is in direct conflict with the emphasis on inventory and waste reduction, one of the key principles of Lean Production. Furthermore, the inflated kanban policy tends to perform well at high levels of supplier on-time delivery and low levels of customer demand variability. These results are consistent with the proper conditions under which to implement Lean Production: good supplier performance and level customer demand. Thus, while the (s, S) inventory policy may be advantageous as a company begins transitioning to Lean Production, the inflated kanban policy may be preferable once the company has established good supplier performance and level customer demand. / Master of Science

If books have a life of their own, oftentimes very different from what their authors might have imagined, how about buildings? How about buildings that only exist on paper, or pixels? Do Time, Tools, Practice, deform or inform the work of years ago? Finally, where have the intentions, the meanings, the hopes, of those years at this university lived these past twenty plus years? Were they released only when I unrolled those drawings, or have they lived with this student as he practiced his profession each day? / Master of Architecture

For humans, architecture is a shelter for dwelling. People seek protection and a sense of belonging in their surroundings. Architecture should reveal the time passage, changes in weather and the character of the place in order to make a place for people to dwell. Sunlight, as an abstraction of the sun, can be received by architecture and connect the place with the universe. This thesis explores how to apply sunlight research as a meaningful tool in architecture design. The research focused on two criteria: orientation and identity. Orientation and identity are the two elements that make a location into a place and make a space into a room. / Master of Architecture / This project is a church located by the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. Light and color are used as means to reveal the movement of the sun and express local memory. The thesis focuses on how sunlight can be introduced into a room and the atmosphere that can be created. As a result, the church is able to tell about its surroundings and make people comfortable.

Architecture provides a vessel for people to once again appreciate their past, while simultaneously experiencing the present. We all linger on our pasts while we live in the moment and think about the future. Future is going to be our present, and later on will be caged in our past. Architectural ideas and believes, when they become real, can help people to gather and pull out their good moments in past while they celebrate their present together; which will be an ideal foundation for their future. Celebrations which will be create from marriage between old and new. An architecture which reminds people their past and causes them to appreciate their moment. It becomes most interesting when the time scales overlap. Those architectural ideals are successful which do not belong to a certain time, but on the other hand have a future perspective. This project will celebrate the merging of past, present and future. / Master of Architecture

In architecture there is perhaps no better opportunity to capture movement and change than in the design of thresholds. They can be a simple strip of metal beneath a doorway, barely noticed as you pass over it, or a grand atrium that you stop and marvel at on your way into the office. They can manifest as a change of materials or finishes, or of some parameter such as ceiling height. They might even be immaterial altogether, like the boundary between light and shadow. Thresholds transcend the physical to effect a psychological experience. They can be spatial or temporal or some combination of the two, but whatever form they take, all thresholds can be said to be mediators of our movement from one spatial status to another. Inside to outside, public to private, here to there. Too often our buildings relegate these changes to doors or openings that have little connection to the buildings they are a part of, and so our awareness of passage from space to space is diminished. This thesis explores ways to enrich the architecture of the threshold so that it doesn't merely recede to the bounds of our perception. / Master of Architecture / The term "threshold" often brings to mind a strip of material at the base of a doorway, but architecture considers thresholds more broadly as moments of movement or change. This thesis examines such moments in an original building design, proposing several threshold types and exploring their impact on occupants.

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