Evaluating innovation in transdisciplinary sustainability education: TRANSECTS’international learning labs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evaluative research can advance sustainability education through the learning it can enable, at micro and systems levels. This proposition is explored by examining evaluation practice in a 6-year international programme entitled Transdisciplinary Education Collaboration for Transformations in Sustainability involving universities and biosphere reserves/regions in Germany, South Africa and Canada. A Transdisciplinary International Learning Lab (TILL) was evaluated using a theory-based evaluation approach and interviews, focus groups and questionnaires that yielded qualitative data. Through meta-reflection, we concluded that our TILL had elements of a Field School, rather than a Learning Lab, and that our curriculum required more explicit deliberation among programme developers and implementers towards a deeper and shared understanding of pedagogical assumptions and more congruent practice of transdisciplinary and transformative sustainability education. The reflective, theory-based approach enabled learning from evaluation and was captured in a shared refinement of the theory of change, which makes it explicit that learning from pedagogical innovations is not only for students but also for academics. The paper is an invitation to other innovators in sustainability science, education and evaluation in higher education, to share related findings.
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.
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 | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it