Innovating, integrating, and influencing: A science program for the 21st century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
McMaster University’s Honours Integrated Science Program (iSci) was the first 4-year integrated science degree program in Canada. It is research-based, both in its pedagogical design as well as in how the students learn in program. This chapter will describe the development, delivery, refinement, and achievements of iSci since before the first cohort were accepted (2009) up to the present. We approach this through the lens of influence—the influences on the program and the program’s influence on external programs and approaches, highlighting the program as a pedagogically innovative and ground-breaking undergraduate science degree. We will concentrate upon four main areas that are indicative of iSci’s innovative structure and approach: (a) the way we achieve and embody integration and interdisciplinarity with our custom pedagogical model; (b) our focus on communication and collaboration—between students and across cohorts, between instructors through active co-teaching, as well as openly among students and instructors; (c) the role and results of science literacy (in its broadest definition) being at the core of the program; and (d) the expected and emergent results of our decade-long, longitudinal pedagogical research study. The development of the iSci Program is iterative and on-going; it integrates influences and innovations, both internal and external, responding to the changing interests and needs of students, instructors, and the global landscape of higher education.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 teacher head, 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".