MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4366384635 · doi:10.3138/cjpe.0025.014

Reflections Over 25 Years: Evaluation Then, Now, and Into the Future

2011· article· en· W4366384635 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Ross F. Conner

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Program Evaluation · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicEvaluation and Performance Assessment
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPsychologyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

When approached to write a commentary for this volume, I was very excited to be involved because I value failure.Let me explain.I am a firm believer that we can learn more from our failures than from our successes.I say "can learn more" instead of "do learn more" because, too often, we miss this valuable opportunity, focusing instead on the frustration, defeat, misunderstandings, recriminations, and justifications that are part of the experience.But failure, or "mistakes" more generally, lie in the realm of knowledge, so if we are alert, we get closer to better knowledge.1 That was the promise and potential I foresaw in the contributions to this special 25th anniversary issue and why I quickly said "yes!" without knowing what the contents would be or who the authors would be.Let me give you an example of why I value failure and mistakes.During my college years at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, I volunteered as a tutor for students from Baltimore's very poor inner-city neighbourhood.One of the elementary school students I tutored, Billy, needed help with math, particularly fractions.I would instruct him on how fractions worked, and then watch as he tackled a problem.Clearly, Billy was working hard and he always came up with an answer-but it was the wrong answer.I tried instructing again, he tried calculating again, but again the result was the wrong answer.So I switched the roles: I let Billy teach me his method of working with fractions.His method was very systematic and thoughtful but it was not the "right" method.Once I understood and could reproduce his method (something Billy was quite pleased about, since he had successfully taught me), I was able to see why he did what he did and what caused his errors.Once we were anchored in his "mistakes," we were able to move together to the correct way to handle fractions.It was his mistakes, once we focused on them, that led Billy-and me-to better knowledge.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.115
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.181
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Evaluation · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.981
Threshold uncertainty score0.610

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1150.181
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0060.006
Scholarly communication0.0180.012
Open science0.0030.010
Research integrity0.0040.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.390
GPT teacher head0.552
Teacher spread0.162 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
DomainEvaluation
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2011
Admission routes1
Has abstractno

Explore more

Same venueCanadian Journal of Program EvaluationSame topicEvaluation and Performance AssessmentFrench-language works237,207