The Promise of ‘Lifelong Learning' and the Canadian Census: The Marginalization of Mature Students' Information Behaviours
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper first examines the rising popularity of 'lifelong learning', its effect on government and university initiatives, and the implications of these initiatives for mature students' academic information behaviours. The paper then presents the findings of one part of a two-phase study, which involved both the manipulation of Canadian Census data and a series of in-depth, qualitative interviews with mature students. In examining the results of the first phase of the study, this paper reports: 1) the national demographic portrait of mature students that is captured by the Census; 2) the limitations of the Census questionnaire for tracking demographic data for mature students; 3) the results from a series of logistic regression tests which used the Census data to explore the social stereotypes of the 'mature student'; 4) a discursive critique of Census-based Statistics Canada documents with implications for the promotion of 'lifelong learning'; and 5) the implications of the marginalization of mature students' experiences in Statistics Canada documents on these students' academic information behaviours.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".