Evaluation of Ontario's targeted dental screening program for schoolchildren: Report No. 2 Health Unit/Department Analyses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior to the 1997-8 school year, all Ontario Public Health Units/Departments provided dental screening to children in Junior and Senior Kindergarten and grades 2, 4, 6 and 8 in every school on an annual basis. During 1997-8 this ‘universal’ program was replaced by a ‘targeted’ approach. The main objectives of the program are to identify children with urgent dental care needs who are, therefore, eligible for dental care under the province of Ontario’s Children in Need of Dental Treatment program, and to identify children who meet eligibility criteria for mandatory preventive dental services. Under the terms of the targeted program, schools are designated as high, medium and low risk with respect to dental care needs based on rates of dental decay among students in Junior and Senior Kindergarten. A school’s risk level determines whether or not screening of children in grades 2, 4, 6 and 8 is undertaken. A study carried out in 1996/7 prior to the change from a universal to a targeted screening approach suggested that the latter would not identify many children with dental care needs. This study replicates and extends this research. The main aims of the study were to: 1) estimate the proportion of children in Junior and Senior Kindergarten and grades 2, 4, 6 and 8 with restorative and preventive dental care needs, and 2) to determine what proportion of those children are identified by the targeted screening program. Additional aims were to: 3) compare the clinical and personal/family characteristics of children who are and are not identified by the targeted program, 4) to determine whether more of these children would be identified, using the same resources, by modifying the targeting criteria, and 5) to assess whether the decay rate among students in JK and SK is an appropriate indicator of a school’s risk status.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".