Mind the Gaps: Examining Youth's Reading, Math and Science Skills Across Northern and Rural Canada*
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
Abstract A new body of sociological research is finding that northern and rural youth, and in particular, low‐SES youth, face difficulties accessing higher levels of postsecondary education and lucrative fields of study such as the STEMs. However, existing research has yet to systematically measure the skills proficiencies of youth in these regions nor have we understood the factors which might account for regional differences. We draw on multiple cycles of Statistics Canada's Youth in Transition Survey, Cohort A linked to the Programme for International Student Assessment scores to investigate how location of residence impacts skills proficiencies at age 15 in math, science, and reading outcomes. Overall, our results point to three key findings. First, southern youth outperform northern youth in mathematics skills. Second, we uncover a southern (both urban and rural) and northern urban advantage in reading proficiencies. Third, in science literacy, southern and northern urban youth experience significant advantages over youth from northern rural locations. While some of the skills differences are attributable to parenting styles, parental socioeconomic status, student academics, and province of residence, they are not completely attenuated by these factors. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future research and public policy.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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