Bibliographic record
Abstract
A History was published in 2022 -the same year in which the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) released its Right to Read report, which aims to secure "an equal opportunity to learn to read" (2) by launching an inquiry "focused on word-level reading" and "phonics programs" (5) and by recommending that "the Ministry of Education, faculties of education and school boards explicitly recognize the term 'dyslexia'" (9). 8The timing of the two publications is an interesting coincidence.The report insists on a "science of reading" (3) and also recommends that "dyslexia" be regarded as "well researched and understood," (8), "the most common learning disability" (9) and the most prevalent special education exceptionality" (9).In contrast, Dyslexia: A History's "central ambition" is to "prevent mistakes of the past from being repeated" by offering an "understanding of the different sides of dyslexia's fascinating story" (x) and historically situating the agents behind dyslexia's complex conceptual development.This historical account appears, then, just as school boards across Ontario have been tasked with implementing the OHRC's report's 157 recommendations including twice-yearly mandatory screening of young students for signs of dyslexia which treats dyslexia an individual problem.At a time where a more singular version of reading and problems with reading are being institutionalized as a scientific fact, "well researched and understood," Dyslexia: A History serves as a necessary and timely reminder of other possible interpretations of reading, readers, and problems.Its authors, Philip Kirby and Margaret Jean Snowling offer a contrasting interpretation to the singular view of the government report since they show how people are not disabled "by their own personal difficulties with reading or writing, but by the almost universal requirement in high-income countries for certain levels of literacy to obtain educational and career success" (8).This book details a (mostly) UK-based history of the medical, psychological, and educational factors that have constituted the meaning of dyslexia.The authors make clear how dyslexia is a condition tied to the assumptions upon which the structures of mass education and mass literacy are based.When read alongside current reports on reading that regard dyslexia as unequivocal fact, well researched and understood, Kirby and Snowling's Dyslexia: A History serves as a necessary counter-narrative expanding our collective relations both to literacy and to those who have problems with reading.This understanding includes a focus on the many professional people involved in identifying and treating problem readers as this plays out in the lives of children at a time when countries base governance and professional participation on literacy.Regarding dyslexia as a history still in the making, Kirby and Snowling's book
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".