Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dyslexia: A History by Phillip Kirby and Margaret Snowling is the outcome of a 6-year research project led by King’s College London and St John’s College, Oxford. Dyslexia affects at least 1 in 10 people. Recently dyslexia has been in the British headlines, with former Member of Parliament Matt Hancock bringing it to the fore again sharing his experience and advocating for awareness and support. Only recently have historians began to conduct research into learning disabilities. Despite the prevalence of dyslexia, Kirby and Snowling provide the first empirical study, charting both the history of social transformation towards the understanding of dyslexia and the actions of the advocates, teachers, supporters and the state intervention for those with dyslexia. The book contains four sections, structured in a chronological format capturing 150 years of history. In the first section of the book, the origins of dyslexia were investigated. In 1877 a German neurologist Adolf Kussmaul was the first to document extreme reading difficulties in children in able children which he referred to as ‘word blindness’. By 1896, British practitioner William Pringle Morgan began research into ‘word blindness’. His findings could be comparable to descriptions of individuals with dyslexia today. Moreover, this was followed by British ophthalmologist, James Hinshelwood, with both producing an accumulation of reports. Pringle Morgan and Hinshelwood performed an important role in associating dyslexia with high intelligence. However, the section notes investigation subsided in the UK due to the influence of English psychologist Cyril Burt. Burt was critical of ‘word blindness’ denouncing the diagnosis as a ‘pseudo-pathology’ used by poorly trained psychiatrists. Research into dyslexia was then overtaken by a pioneering study undertaken by American physician Samuel Orton. Orton focused his research on the USA delving into reading and writing challenges and multi-sensory learning and teaching. Additionally, in 1930, in the Netherlands, the first specialist school for dyslexic students was opened.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.024 |
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".