Editorial ACTION RESEARCH AND THE ROLE OF THE “MIDWIFE”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend men and not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labour, and not after their bodies; and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth. Plato, Dialogues, Theaetetus, p. 150 With a few glaring differences, these words, spoken by Socrates and transcribed by Plato in the fourth century B.C., may very well apply to the authors of this issue of the Ontario Action Researcher. Each article represents a segment of the educational community that does not give birth to ideas at the grade-school classroom level, but through dialogue, aid, and mentorship, eases the delivery. Indeed, this segment of the action research process too often fades into the background once the bustle is finished. Quite frequently, myths begin to emerge that action research is a sole activity, or something that can only be engaged in between peers. While lone action research is indeed an achievable (and heroic) endeavour, it can also lead to a number of difficulties that may endanger the project: You, the lone researcher may indeed have a “false idol”, or a project that you may feel of great use, but in actuality may be off-base when helping students learn; Your project may wither away due to lack of attention as other aspects of your job take priority; Your project may become stunted due to the confines of your four classroom walls; Because you may want to get the implementation over with quickly, you may not realize the steady pace needed for a project to develop; and finally, at times you may need someone with expert knowledge to console you that this project is actually needed; not just a symbol of more work. These issues have been
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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 | 0.010 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.014 |
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".