Marginalized Non-Traditional Adult Learners: Beyond Economics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Changing demographics and patterns of higher education participation in many countries, including Canada, have prompted a growing interest in improving access for non-traditional adult learners. This paper focuses on the results of a research study funded by the Canadian Council on Learning that profiles 71 learners in three Canadian university-level Radical Humanities programs designed for low-income people. Four thematic areas explore the barriers and supports that impact students’ ability to access post-secondary education: (1) barriers to further education, (2) concept of self as learner, (3) learning space, and (4) role of the humanities. This paper argues that while poverty limits educational participation, a greater challenge is posed for marginalized non-traditional adult learners by complex relationships among economic and non-material barriers that limit their agency. Effectively increasing post-secondary participation rates for marginalized non-traditional adult learners cannot be achieved by addressing economic issues alone but by addressing the structural nature and impact of inter-related economic and non-material barriers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".