Through the Eyes of the Beholders: Adult Literacy Students' Recollections of Regular School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2003, 37 adult literacy students were interviewed within the context of a qualitative study of two community-based adult literacy programs in Manitoba, Canada. In addition to sharing their perspectives on these programs, the students proffered information about their own regular experiences and why they left without graduating. Several students reported positive memories, but most had been bitterly disappointed for a variety of personal and school-based reasons. This article explores these adult students' recollections of regular school, as a catalyst for suggesting ways to make high schools more accommodating of students who are at risk of dropping out. In 2003, I interviewed 37 adult literacy students within the context of a qualitative case study that examined various stakeholders' connections to two community-based adult literacy programs in Manitoba, Canada. The two programs were chosen on the basis of having been in operation for at least 10 years, having the same program coordinator for the past tiiree years, and , receiving community-based adult literacy funding from the Government of Manitoba in 2003-03. The students were self-selected through open sampling, with the assistance of each program coordinator. In addition to sharing their perspectives on the literacy programs during the one-to-one interviews, the students proffered information about their own regular experiences and why they left without graduating from high school. This article explores diese adult students' recollections of regular school, as a catalyst for suggesting ways to make high schools more accommodating of students who are at risk of dropping out. Several adult literacy students reported positive memories of their regular years, but most had been bitterly disappointed for a variety of personal and school-based reasons. Aside from providing appropriate personal counselling services, regular schools cannot be expected to solve the personal problems that render students at risk of quitting. Addressing school-based problems, however, is an entirely different matter. If we can identify and resolve these issues, then perhaps we can persuade students-at-risk to persist through high graduation. The adult literacy students that were interviewed complained of the following school-based reasons for leaving early: rules, instruction, and relationships with teachers and peers. All given names in this article are pseudonyms. The following definitions apply, in accordance with their use in the research study, regular schools are private or public grade schools, adults are individuals at least 21 years old, students-at-risk are regular students who are at risk of dropping out, and youth-at-risk are individuals under the age of 21 years who have already dropped out or are at risk of doing so. School Rules Twelve adult literacy students recalled being unable or unwilling to follow the rules of their regular schools. They admitted having skipped classes on a regular basis before quitting. A few blamed their schools' attendance policies for pushing them out. John declared, As soon as the gets its year's grant from the fall registration, the teachers make attendance contracts the students can't live up to, just to get rid of them. Peter said that he had been humiliated by being moved into a remedial resource room, and he had reacted by leaving the room and ripping around the school instead of doing his schoolwork. Colin described himself as a problem - anything they said to do, I would do the opposite. Before being expelled from her nonacademic program, Heather had been physically restrained to control her violent outbursts in class. The literature on youth-at-risk associates lack of affiliation with attendance and behaviour problems. Chronic absenteeism is a reliable predictor of dropping out (Lovitt, 1991; Morris, Pawlovich, & McCaIl, 1991). …
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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 | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".