The Socio-Environmental Aspects of Students’ Food Literacy: An Exploratory Case Study of Two Ontarian High Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
North American food environments have gone through dramatic shifts over the past six decades. During this period, we have witnessed the consolidation of a globalizing industrial agrifood regime, accompanied by new types of foods available and an excess of marketing. In recent years however, a growing number of scholars, environmentalists, rural organizations and consumers have highlighted the negative environmental and social impacts of this model of large scale, intensive monocultures. Another critique that has been more and more common is the lack of a comprehensive food literacy among youth populations. This thesis starts from the assumption that such knowledge is crucial to equip younger generations with the ability to understand the connections among these issues, to make conscious and informed choices and become engaged citizens, participating in transforming today’s predominantly unsustainable agrifood systems. This is essential as younger generations are the future consumers, heads of households and decision-makers in Canadian society. As such, one of the primary objectives of this research was to (re)situate the concept of food literacy amidst the many literatures while also providing an original comprehensive framework of analysis, reaffirming both its health and well-being and agrifood systems components. Consequently, and based on such assessments, the thesis offers an original and exploratory analysis of high school students’ food literacy levels. Using a mixed methods approach, it draws from qualitative and quantitative primary data resources and secondary literature to survey and compare eight groups of students in grades 9 and 10 in Ontario. Four of these groups took a food-related class and four were control groups, between two different types of food-related curricula. The research shows that a majority of the high school students who participated in the study have a basic level of food literacy. This is especially notable when including socio-environmental considerations in order to assess their level of agrifood systems’ literacy, which is the main focus and contribution that this research sought to evaluate.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".