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The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the effect of collaborative work on primary-age children's reasoning about shape, space and measure. Children's early development in these areas of mathematics has been well researched but the difficulties older children experience are less well charted. Method: An intervention study was carried out with two Year 5 classes in a South London primary school using a naturalistic experimental design with two parallel classes as the intervention and control groups. The intervention class undertook two iterations of group work while the control class worked individually across the two sessions. An innovative pre- to post-test measure was developed using the Rasch Analysis partial credit model. This consisted of two sets of six similar and overlapping think-aloud tasks. The design of the group work was informed by both sociocultural and socio-cognitive conflict theory: ground rules for talk were used in the intervention class and the children were grouped in triads with differing ideas (elicited from their pre-test responses). Novel features were included to increase the likelihood of all children encountering challenge to their initial ideas: a) the children were prompted to reflect on the certainty of their joint or individual answers at the end of the first session; b) the children all had the chance to consult written clues in the second session, at the cost of a point per clue. Analysis: Quantitative comparison of the children's progress from pre- to post-test was complemented with qualitative analysis of the children's use of language across the study. Transcripts of the children talking about the shape, space and measurement tasks were coded for imaginative expressions to explore whether imaginative forms were associated with more sophisticated reasoning about shape, space and measure. The children's group talk was coded for exploratory features of language to evaluate the impact on the children's reasoning of the prompt to reflect on the certainty of their joint responses. Findings: The children working in groups made significantly more progress than the children working alone from pre- to post-test, as hypothesised, and they were more effective in their decisions about whether to seek help in the form of written clues than children working alone. Following the prompt to reflect on their group answers, there were changes in the observed language of the intervention groups. While the overall use of exploratory features: "because", "I think", "I agree/disagree" and modal verbs remained similar from session one to session two, there was a significant increase in the use of modal verbs following the prompt (p < .05). Swift surface-level agreements were probed further after a group consensus had been reached. Using a grounded approach, the children's imaginative expressions across the study were coded and three categories identified: movement, manipulation or decomposition. Children working with peers made more progress and increased their use of imaginative expressions from pre- to post-test by comparison with the children working alone. Temporal analysis of the children's talk across the study revealed common examples of imaginative work that supported the development of more sophisticated reasoning. For example, imagining "splitting" and "halving" objects served as a heuristic bridge towards inferring length and finding the difference. Similarly, by imagining "turning" and "squashing" familiar shapes, children began to create axioms about the properties of shape beyond iconic examples and orientations. The partial credit model used to measure children's progress in this study increases our knowledge about the incremental steps that children make in their understanding about geometry and measurement in the upper primary years. By revealing the imaginative language tools the children used to probe their existing reasoning models, this study highlights the importance of children articulating their imaginative work in maths with peers.

This study investigates visual artists' experiences and views of their undergraduate fine art education, focussing on encounters of professional development in London art schools between 1986-2016. It foregrounds artists' voices, analysing their motivations and justifications for attending, how they participated in professional pedagogies, what was accepted, rejected, and incorporated into professional practices, and the effects of art schooling since graduating. The study presents a unique insight into understanding artists' art schooled identities, myths, freedoms, and professionalisation. I developed an approach that combines social scientific methods of Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM), with arts-based/informed methods, including drawing, making, speaking, filming, editing, and performing, to analyse interviews with twelve artists, covering graduate exit points in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. This approach embeds reflexivity and performativity, bringing new methods to GTM, expanding GTM's set of recommended methods to include my creative interpretation. This resulted in a rigorous and reflexive exploration of what artists said of their art schooling, fracturing and questioning the artists' narratives in developing the ones presented here. The findings reveal art schooling causes deep and lasting emotionally embedded tensions, conflicts, and contradictions in the artists' identities, myths, freedoms, and professionalisation. This study furthers understanding of how artists' identities are implicated during art schooling, how they form through art schooled tensions, and these tensions' lasting effects on shaping artists' identities. The art school is positioned as important to artists' development, particularly in its perpetuation of myths around luck, innate talent, artists' specialness, and certain freedoms. Structureless pedagogies are shown to heighten the circulation of artistic myths, generating misconceptions of freedoms. Both during and after art schooling this mythification is revealed to conspire ongoing affective labour, realised through efforts to self-regulate through de/re-mythification. This supports negotiations of post-pedagogised identities, which fold both resistance and acceptance of art schooled experiences into them. Myth is perpetuated as part of relative freedoms in ongoing practices towards professional identities.

Lymphoma is a haematopoietic malignancy consisting of two broad categories: Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). These categories can be further split into subtypes with classical HL (cHL) and diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) being the commonest subtypes. The gold standard imaging modality for staging and response assessment for cHL and DLBCL is 2-deoxy-2-[fluorine-18]fluoro-D-glucose (FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT), with patients having a worse prognosis if they do not demonstrate complete metabolic response (CMR). However, approximately 15% of patients will relapse even after CMR. Therefore, being able to identify patients who are likely to relapse it may be possible to stratify treatment early to improve patient outcomes. The aim of this project is to develop and test image derived predictive models based on the baseline PET/CT to risk stratify patients pre-treatment.

Aortitis refers to inflammatory conditions affecting the aortic wall that cannot be explained by atherosclerosis alone. Large Vessel Vasculitis (LVV) is the main type of non-infectious aortitis and can affect any of the large arteries. Aortitis and LVV are difficult to diagnose and treat due to a variety of reasons such as non-specific symptoms and diagnostic tests, a large number of potential causes, and risks involved in providing incorrect or delayed treatment. [18F]-Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography-Computed Tomography (FDG PET-CT) imaging plays a key role in diagnosis of LVV due to its ability to detect inflammation early and non-invasively, but is mostly assessed qualitatively making its interpretation vulnerable to bias and inter-observer variation. Therefore, there is a need for more reliable imaging biomarkers which can be achieved with radiomic analysis. The aim of this thesis is to explore the diagnostic ability of radiomic features in FDG PET-CT imaging of aortitis. First, the feasibility is determined and a methodological pipeline established. Next, the findings are validated with data from multiple centres and the overall method automated. The first step of the method is the aortic segmentation using an artificial intelligence which produces similar radiomic features as the manual segmentation. When used as input in the diagnostic models, several individual radiomic features and groups of radiomic features demonstrated high diagnostic performance across the training, test and validation cohorts. In particular features based on heterogeneity perform well. The method displayed good generalizability and transferability which is important prerequisites for clinical use. These findings could be used to build an automated clinical decision tool which would facilitate objective and standardized assessment regardless of observer experience.