Weighing the Evidence: Historians-in-training in the Elementary Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using an inquiry approach in the elementary social studies curriculum provides opportunities for students to gain skills as historians-in-training. When the inquiry examines modified historical sources, students develop critical thinking and perspective-taking while they learn to consider the point of view, context, missing information, and possible bias. These skills are crucial to engage as informed citizens in a participatory democracy. The authors present an inquiry-based lesson about the impact of Westward Expansion. Students were supported in their exploration of historical sources to draw conclusions using evidence. The original historical sources include advertisements, petitions, photos, letters, and reports—each modified by the authors to support elementary learners. After scaffolded investigations into each source, students were tasked with answering the essential question: What was the impact of Westward Expansion?
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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 | 0.014 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
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".