Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers educators’ debates over the proper place of the atomic theory in American and Ontario high schools during the first decade of the twentieth century, in the context of emerging, historic research on the nature of matter. In 1905, University of Toronto chemist William Lash Miller distributed a booklet instructing Ontario teachers how to teach chemistry without the atomic theory. According to Lash Miller and his Toronto colleagues, who edited a new textbook in 1906, teaching the atomic theory to beginners bred flawed and fuzzy reasoning. Lash Miller was a student of Wilhelm Ostwald, who famously doubted the reality of atoms until convinced by Jean Perrin’s 1908 experiments on Brownian motion. This paper shows that limiting the role of the atomic theory was part of an effort, both in Ontario and in the United States, to reorient the high school curriculum toward the expanding discipline of physical chemistry, specifically, a vision of physical chemistry indebted to Ostwald. Like the Toronto chemists, Chicago physical chemist Alexander Smith lamented high school textbooks’ overreliance on the atomic theory and promoted the use of laboratory terms. Both Lash Miller and Smith met with resistance from high school teachers, who defended the teaching of the atomic theory and advocated a competing view of beginners’ pedagogy. These debates were not settled primarily by appeals to evidence, but instead revolved around differing views of the needs and abilities of high school students.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.009 |
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".