A Difficult Journey: Transitioning from STEM to SoTL
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay unearths difficulties experienced by scholars trained in the STEM disciplines when transitioning into the research context that is SoTL. We, a scientist and an engineer, engaged in a series of audiotaped reflective discussions (facilitated by a social science researcher) designed to tease out the difficulties associated with this contextual shift. Our discussions pointed to issues that go beyond the oft-quoted methodological differences of a quantitative versus qualitative approach, speaking instead to barriers associated with: time, emotions, intellectual training and world-views. Embracing a complexity approach to the generation of knowledge and understanding led us to an appreciation of the role of narrative and allowed us to dissolve dualisms that we had associated with STEM and SoTL. Our next step is to extend the conversation to include other ‘scholar-travelers’ in a series of workshops aimed at addressing the barriers and bridges associated with journeying from STEM to SoTL.
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.
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 | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it