Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore and document the nature of children's participation in elementary school science in British Columbia, Canada. Using an ethnographic approach, extensive fieldnotes provide the foundation addressing the question "What is the activity of science in an elementary school?" Although current science curriculum documents continue to cast science at school as a possible mirror of science in the 'real' world, this is a thesis about elementary school science and a community of inquiry that evolves at school. Instead of separating process and content, this thesis emphasizes their co-emergence. Drawing upon sociocultural and enactivist perspectives, the focus is on learning and context, learner and content as they co-evolve. This study was conducted in one elementary class at the intermediate level (Grade 6/7) across one school year. The teacher and I collaborated to plan and teach science with a focus on creating opportunities for children to participate. Children embarked on three extensive science adventures with their teacher, working in teams of four or five and learning as a community of inquiry. Using audio taped records of children's and the teacher's comments, children's creations, as well as my fieldnotes, I construct a narrative of one year of school science. Researcher, children, and teacher describe what it means to participate in a diversity of ways and, if we wish to understand how children learn science it is important to listen. Data analysis reveals the importance of contexts for participation in elementary school science. In particular, I identify "spaces of inquiry" that afforded students diverse opportunities to participate with science content in a community of inquiry. They are generative spaces, rehearsal spaces, and performative spaces. Spaces of inquiry are important because they provide an alternative way to think about learning and teaching science, they provide opportunities for designing collaborative group work, and they challenge educators to consider children's contributions to their science learning. Overall, this ethnographic study illustrates a dynamic interdependence of learners and their environment in this open-ended, creative adventure in and through school science.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".