A path less travelled: The case of a Canadian pathways program for international students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dr Kelly Shoecraft was interviewed by Andrew Scott on her return to Australia about her experiences teaching at Vantage College, which is operated by the University of British Columbia, Canada. The college is exclusively for international students and employs innovative discipline specific university pathway courses that are informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The pathway program is of particular interest for two main reasons. Firstly, the Academic English program runs throughout the students’ first year of university study alongside their main courses (rather than the pre-entry pathways more commonly found in the U.K. and Australia). Secondly, the program’s design develops discipline specific academic English courses in Science, Applied Science (Engineering), Arts, and Management. We believe this will be of interest to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers, those involved in providing university pathway courses and readers with an interest in SFL. The interview was conducted by electronic email and has been very lightly edited for clarity.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.076 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.001 |
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".