Numeracy Programming at Major Canadian Urban Libraries: An Exploratory Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Government of Canada identifies numeracy as a foundational skill for work, learning, and life. Libraries have historically been champions of literacy; however, the role of libraries in developing numeracy skills is understudied. Specifically, there is a critical gap in studying numeracy programs offered by public libraries. This exploratory study examines the state of numeracy programming at five major urban public libraries in Canada (Calgary Public Library, Edmonton Public Library, Bibliothèques de Montréal, Ottawa Public Library, and Toronto Public Library) to understand the types and varieties of numeracy programs that they offer. The frequency of programs, the intended age range, and the program content are the main foci of this paper. The researchers examined 1166 program listings by scraping programming information from the five libraries’ websites. The data was collected for the second week of December 2015 and relied on programming descriptions from libraries' websites. Results showed that a total of 65 programs (5.6% of total programs) covered numeracy related skills. Overall, the options to learn about numeracy concepts were very limited at all of the libraries in the sample. Calgary offered the highest number of children-focused numeracy programs, while Toronto offered the greatest number of adult-focused numeracy programs. “Math/mathematics” was the most common term used to describe numeracy-related programs. This exploratory study underscores the need for greater investigation of numeracy programming in public libraries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.085 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".