Does the Geography Major Fit in STEM?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STEM education plays a significant role in developing reasoning and technical skills among other benefits. Definitions of geography vary somewhat, but most of the sources define geography as a science. Geography relates to the STEM disciplines with application of geographical tools to solve problems. However, geography is not included as a STEM discipline by federal authorities in the United States (US). This paper presents evidence from US graduate and undergraduate geography programs demonstrating how geography qualifies as a STEM discipline, a qualification that could provide a variety of benefits for the programs and students alike. This research suggests that more than 50% of US colleges/universities confer Bachelor of Science (BS) or Master of Science (MS) degrees in geography and the distribution of these institutions occurs in most states. Therefore, geography has already been recognized as a STEM major by these US colleges/universities that offer STEM coursework including physical geography, Geographic Information System (GIS), remote sensing, natural resources, environmental science, and atmospheric science. Hence, it follows that government authorities should recognize geography as STEM.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".