Level 3, Bureaucrats, and Stigmatization: Why 'Mainstreaming' Literacy Failed in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines why the promise of 'mainstreaming' (adult) literacy in Canada was never realized, although there was a period of time, from the late 1980s until the early/mid-2000s, when interest in literacy was strong among the public, in the media, and with policy-makers. Based on recent and previous research, including interviews with key stakeholders, we argue that mainstreaming literacy has failed and explore the reasons for this failure. The chapter is structured in three sections. In the first, we recount the history of literacy in Canada over three phases: i) the period from the 1970s up until the launch of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) in 1994; ii) the story of IALS and changes occurring up until around 2005, and, iii) the period from around 2006, which marked a clear policy shift in the approach to literacy. The second section examines the reasons for the failure of the mainstreaming of literacy in Canada. We conclude by reflecting on the present situation of adult literacy, which has been largely reduced to employability skills which are under-supported.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".