Exploring Israeli high school graduates’ explanations for the spread of the coronavirus
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study is to explore Israeli high school graduates' mathematical explanations for the spread of the coronavirus, given that the mathematics required to do so was part of their school curriculum. An online questionnaire consisting of two sections provided a variety of potential framings for explaining the phenomenon. The first section invited the participants to explain the spread of the coronavirus in terms of their school majors in general, with no specific reference to mathematics. The second section asked explicitly to explain the mathematical context underlying the phenomenon. In this section, the participants were asked to discuss the Prime Minister's speech given in the media a few weeks earlier, in which he described the spread of the coronavirus as a geometric series. Data analysis of 87 participants' responses to the questionnaire revealed 11 different mathematical ideas used to explain the spread of the coronavirus. These ideas included are as follows: doubling, sequence, exponential growth, using powers, tree diagram, recursion, fast-growing rate with covariation, probability, parabola and quadratic function, acceleration, and factorial. It was also found that the second section of the questionnaire elicited a wider range of mathematical ideas than the first one. We suggest possible explanations for the emergence of the mathematical ideas, which seem to reflect the graduates' intuitive knowledge, influenced not only by their mathematics track level but also by their chosen high school majors. Possible implications are discussed.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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