Chapter 23 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVALUATION PRACTICES IN THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
responding to the same pressures as other communities in governments around the world to produce better information for taxpayers on programme achievements. At the heart of this response are a number of organisations, including the Canadian Parliament, the Auditor General, the Treasury Board, and numerous departments and agencies, each with their own perspective on programme evaluation. Members of the evaluation community are prominent in this process, given their expertise in the performance information field. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the S&T initiatives of the Industry Portfolio – a group of 13 organisations reporting to the Industry Minister. The Canadian federal programme evaluation system has been in place for approximately 20 years. Each organisation is responsible for evaluating its own initiatives, under policy set by the Treasury Board. In most cases, an evaluation framework is established at the start of a programme. The framework identifies performance expectations and specific, detailed requirements for ongoing performance monitoring (to serve ongoing management decision making) and for a future programme evaluation study. This includes evaluation issues, performance measures, data collection, analysis and reporting, and evaluation approaches. In the evaluation study systematic research methods are used and, typically, three main issues are examined: programme relevance, success and cost-effectiveness. The evaluation function is prominent in supporting the Canadian Government’s enhanced emphasis on programme outcomes and its new approach in reporting to Parliament. As in most fields, it has taken some time to develop a specialised capability for evaluating S&T initiatives, particularly in organisations in which S&T represents but a portion of their overall activities. The traditional approaches used for assessing S&T have expanded from a focus on peer review to include other programme evaluation and internal audit methods. The development of evaluation capacity was sustained through such supportive efforts as the 1986 Treasury Board
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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 | 0.046 | 0.072 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".