Constructing School Science: Physics, Biology, and Chemistry Education in Ontario High Schools, 1880 -1940
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a history of science education reform in Ontario, from 1880 to 1940. It examines successive eras of science education reform in secondary (pre-university) schools, including the rise of laboratory science; the spread of general science programs; and efforts to teach science “humanistically.” This research considers the rhetorical strategies employed by scientists and educators to persuade educational policymakers and the public about the value and purpose of science education. Their efforts hinged in large part on building a moral framework for school science, which they promoted an essential stimulus to students’ mental development and a check on the emotive influence of literature and the arts. These developments are placed in international context by examining how educational movements conceived in other places, especially the United States and Britain, were filtered and transformed in the distinct educational context of Ontario. Finally, the sometimes-blurry boundaries between “academic” science education and technical education are explored, most notably in Ontario in the late nineteenth century, when science education was undergoing a rapid, driven expansion in the province’s high schools. This research contributes to a relatively recent body of literature that promotes a greater appreciation of pre-college science education – an area that has often been overlooked in favour of higher education and the training of specialists – as an important window onto the public perception of science.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".