Bibliographic record
Abstract
The interviews were then analysed in greater depth in order to produce a grounded theory. Three overarching categories emerged in this analysis: stakeholders' roles, attitude toward early intervention, and attitude toward autism. Examination of stakeholders' understanding of each other's roles revealed that many parents were unclear about the role of psychologists in TPAS. Moreover, there was a diversity of opinions regarding parental involvement in the program. Analysis of stakeholders' attitudes toward early intervention revealed that most stakeholders, parents and staff alike, did not subscribe to the basic principles of early intervention. Finally, analysis of stakeholders' attitudes toward autism revealed that a medical/deficit approach to autism prevailed. A different approach, viewing children with autism as having different motivations and needs, was markedly less dominant. The medical/deficit approach dominated stakeholders' understanding of autism, of early intervention, and of the way TPAS works. The objective of the study was to gain an in-depth understanding of parent and staff perceptions of preschool autism programs. Forty-eight individuals who were involved with the Toronto Preschool Autism Service (TPAS), a preschool intervention program serving children ages two to six in the Greater Toronto Area were interviewed for this study. Guided by the "logic model" approach, the qualitative analysis produced two alternative models that described the way the program works. These models were presented to the stakeholders in three focus groups where stakeholders had the opportunity to generate a theoretical model based on their understanding of the findings brought before them. These models were synthesized into a final model that was again presented to stakeholders and finalized. The final logic model is an important product of this dissertation with implications for program evaluation, and further research in this field. The model suggests that the emphasis in the literature on intelligence as the foremost outcome indicator of program success is unwarranted. Instead, the model suggests more emphasis on mediating factors such as quality of implementation and child and family characteristics, as well as on evaluating several short- and long-term goals. Additional specific recommendations regarding future quantitative evaluations based on this model are outlined in the body of this work.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".