Calibrating the ‘right values’: the role of critical inquiry tasks in social studies textbooks
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
The issue of how to represent a nation’s past in history textbooks has been the source of vigorous debate across a variety of educational contexts. Some textbooks have been criticized for their simplistic, nation-building stories and the meta-narrative of ‘progress’ they engender. While many contemporary textbooks include critical inquiry tasks for developing learners’ historical thinking skills, the extent to which they actually facilitate critical thinking is unclear. This article employs methods grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for analyzing verbal and visual text to examine evaluative meaning in the core narrative and two critical inquiry tasks of a Canadian social studies textbook chapter. The findings show an uneasy coexistence between the aims of providing opportunities for critical engagement and communicating a cohesive story of the nation’s collective experiences. Rather than platforms for facilitating interpretive independence, the critical inquiry tasks appear to be spaces for drawing out or calibrating the ‘right values’ developed through the core narrative of the chapter.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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