Student Achievement Trajectories in Ontario: Creating and validating a province-wide, multi-cohort and longitudinal database
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Longitudinal data that tracks student achievement over many years are crucial for understanding children's learning and for guiding effective policies and interventions. Despite being Canada's most populous province, Ontario lacks such large-scale and longitudinal data on student learning. Linking datasets across cohorts requires rigorous linkage protocols, flexible handling of complex cohort structures, methods to validate linked datasets, and viable organizational partnerships. We linked administrative data on early child development and educational achievement and merged two datasets on characteristics of students' neighborhoods and schools. We developed a linkage protocol and validated how the resulting database could be generalized to Ontario's student population. Methods and analysis: Two main individual-level data sources were linked: 1) the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a school readiness assessment of all Ontario public school kindergartners that is administered in three-year cycles, and 2) Ontario's Educational Quality and Assessment Office's (EQAO) math and reading assessments in grades 3, 6, 9, and 10. To compensate for their lack of a common personal identification number, a deterministic linkage process was developed using several administrative variables. A school-level and a neighborhood-level dataset were also later linked. We examined differences between unlinked and linked cases across several variables. Results and implications: We successfully linked 50% of the EDI's 374,239 cases, 86,778 of which contained all five datapoints, creating a database tracking achievement for multiple cohorts from kindergarten through grade 10, with covariates for their development, demographics, affect, neighborhoods, and schools. Analyses revealed only negligible differences between linked and unlinked cases across several demographic measures, while small differences were detected across a neighborhood socioeconomic index and some measures of child development. In conclusion, we recommend the filling of key voids in sustainable research capacity by creating representative data through linkage protocols and data verification.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".