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Record W4416365471 · doi:10.29333/ijese/17443

Regression from meaning? Ecological concepts as opaque empty shells–Redux

2025· article· W4416365471 on OpenAlexaffabout
Tom Puk

Bibliographic record

VenueInterdisciplinary Journal of Environmental and Science Education · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicEnvironmental Education and Sustainability
Canadian institutionsLakehead University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsChristian ministrySubject (documents)Environmental educationRegression analysisEcological systems theory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In 2000 the Ontario Ministry of Education decided to integrate environmental education into all subject areas rather than create a distinct, compulsory subject area K-12 for ecological literacy. The current study is a follow up to a 2010 study to determine whether the ability of teacher-candidates to define key ecological concepts has improved over the previous fifteen years while they were students during the Ontario Ministry of Education’s policy of integration. The results of the current study are very similar to that of the 2010 study. For the concepts of the environment, sustainability, green, fossil fuels, and entropy, there were no consistent shared definitions for any of these concepts. Teacher-candidates appear to have quite varied understanding of these concepts. The suggestion is made that the results of both studies may indicate a “regression from meaning” and that for many teacher-candidates the words they use often represent “opaque empty shells.”

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.591
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.006
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0140.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.325
Teacher spread0.318 · 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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