A TESTBED CRITICAL DOCUMENT ANALYSIS OF UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN MASTER OF CONTINUING EDUCATION THESES: AN INITIAL MAPPING OF ADULT EDUCATION IN THE PROVINCE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives The research study (theorizing from the literature) has the overarching goal of producing a systematized analysis of a three-themed subset of existing master’s of continuing education theses at the University of Saskatchewan in preparation for a future full-scale analysis. The analysis provides data to begin mapping the theses topics and where past graduates are working in the province. The study will systematically organize a subset of the theses under three particular adult education themes: Indigenous focus, university extension, and non-formal learning centers. The content of these theses will be analyzed in regard to the variety of categorical elements within the critical literature review process. The topics and issues discovered in the process are related to larger themes within the field of Canadian adult education. Literature Meta-analyses of adult education materials are not unusual activities for practitioners who view a portion of their work to be in service of the larger profession. All forms of literature reviews work with primary sources and are efforts to locate individuals, communities, movements, and moments that can collectively strengthen adult educator’s knowledge and practice. There is a gap in the popular literature in regard to adult education in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Given that the University of Saskatchewan’s lifelong learning cohort courses are place- and community-based with an Indigenous focus, having readings that speak directly to issues and strengths of the province would be highly welcomed. An analogous approach to mapping the history of adult education in Saskatchewan is the long-term goal of this project. Methodology The research study employs a critical literature review framework that is recognized as a research approach in and of itself. Susan Imel, former director at Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), wrote in an article entitled Writing a Critical Literature Review that many do not realize that constructing a freestanding literature review that is organized, systematic, and critical is an accepted form of research. The analysis conducted within this framework allows for a full examination of the contents of selected theses that fall within the three themes: Indigenous focus, university extension, and non-formal learning centers. The testbed process begins by training a graduate student on the critical literature review format and options. Next, all the theses titles and abstracts are read to locate a smaller subset that fits within the three-themed parameter. At this point the system of critically examining the subset of theses is constructed. There are many ways of doing this task (topically, historically, culturally, etc.) but the chosen lens will emerge from the titles, locations, and purposes of the thesis subset collection. Once the lens is chosen a spreadsheet is created with the graduate student and is populated by the theses-appropriate categories (subjects, methodology, design/analysis, theoretical framework, conclusion/results, implications, weaknesses, strengths, etc.) The actual document analysis will then be conducted with the graduate student using this carefully constructed framework and looking for commonalities and differences across the subset of theses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".