THE LOGIC OF CONSENSUS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE EDUCATION IN CANADA: A DELPHI STUDY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite certain episodes of Canadian influences on science education, the last six decades of science education in Canada has been a decidedly American experience – particularly from the standpoints of: 1) the foundational policy documents that have provided explicit impetus to periodic science curriculum reform in Canada; 2) the principal theoretical foundations, guiding assumptions, and goals of science education, and; 3) the development of curricular frameworks in Canadian provincial jurisdictions. Though contested, it will be argued here and supported by the research that the Canadian systems of science education operating in the provinces and territories have not had opportunity, historically, to engage in the architecture of curriculum uniquely from Canada that supplies broad and respected appeal to the context of Canadian society, its demographics, its geographic diversity, and its geo-political position internationally. The objective of this dissertation was to empirically determine the principal theoretical foundations and system conditions for a Canadian approach to science education. The research was conducted and documented through an online, anonymous, and asynchronous modified Delphi methodology. Over a five-month period, the assembled expert panel of 54 peer-acknowledged and representative science and education specialists from Canada - comprising fourteen identifiable professional affiliations in two cohorts - participated in a Delphi having three rounds. This first-of-kind Delphi has identified a number of consensus positions in accordance with standard statistical criteria developed in the research design. These consensus positions occur across four principal areas of impact on Canadian science education: (1) significant national and international globalization trends; (2) the foundations and goals of science education; (3) roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in curriculum, and; (4) a context for the future of science education in Canada. The findings of the study provide a new basis for, and constitute potential new challenges to, science education in Canada and argue persuasively for new terminology. Sustainability Science, Technology, Economy and Environment (SSTEE) is presented as a new, original guiding foundation for science education in Canada. This terminology constitutes a new tension for science curriculum and directly challenges the emergent trend of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) as a basis for science curriculum reform.
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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 | 0.171 | 0.179 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".