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In June 2024, the British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF) hosted a "Think Tank on Meaningful Inclusion for Students with Disabilities and Diverse Needs." The "Think Tank" sought to shift the frame for the conversation, asking what might happen when there is time and space to think beyond binaries and divisive positions. By foregrounding desire, the "Think Tank" invited conversations around the not yet, starting from several shared assumptions: (1) not if…how - inclusion "should" and "can" be happening. The work is "how" to get there; (2) complexity - inclusion will not and cannot look the same for every child. This understanding must be held alongside all children's right to full participation in meaningful education and learning; (3) tensions and contradictions - how inclusive education is defined, conceptualized, and practiced cannot be simplified or flattened to a single model or vision of what it looks like; and (4) curiosity - tensions and contradictions can be met with curiosity and an agreement to listen and learn, while not necessarily sharing the same conclusions. Building on these assumptions, this report does not present a linear record of the conversation or fixed conclusions emerging from the "Think Tank." Instead, by synthesizing themes - and recognizing tensions and contradictions within the two days of dialogue - it invites the reader to think alongside the diverse experiences and perspectives of what meaningful inclusion looks and feels like and how, together, stronger and more diverse communities of belonging can be created.

This study used Postsecondary Student Information System (PSIS) administrative data within the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform to compare enrolment and persistence in postsecondary education (PSE) among high school graduates in British Columbia with and without special needs across five cohorts from 2010/2011 to 2014/2015 before and after controlling for several sociodemographic characteristics and academic achievement. The use of integrated longitudinal administrative data from the British Columbia Ministry of Education, the PSIS and the T1 Family File and the disaggregation of the special needs categorization were two major strengths of this study. Results show that high school graduates with mental health-related or cognitive needs and those with physical or sensory needs were less likely to enrol in PSE compared with high school graduates without special needs, even after controlling for covariates. Moreover, graduates with mental health-related or cognitive needs were less likely to transition to PSE immediately and less likely to persist in PSE two years after enrolment. These findings suggest that high school graduates with special needs, particularly those with mental health-related or cognitive needs, may encounter different types of barriers in transitioning to PSE.

The term "summer melt" denotes a phenomenon when post-secondary students who received an offer of admission and may have paid a deposit when accepting the offer, "fail to enroll at all in the fall after high school graduation". Assessing the extent of summer melt and the success of measures to reduce it has become more relevant for jurisdictions/institutions with dwindling enrolments, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This short report reviews factors contributing to summer melt, including different types of barriers for admitted post-secondary applicants, strategies to reduce summer melt and their success. The prospects and options of estimating summer melt at the system level in British Columbia are also discussed.

Statistics Canada releases data on the labour market outcomes of college and university graduates using data from the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP). Statistics Canada has developed the ELMLP in collaboration with the provincial and territorial ministries of education, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), and other stakeholders. The ELMLP allows longitudinal integration of administrative data related to education with other data sources to provide anonymized, customized datasets for analytical purposes. The data used for the calculation of graduate outcome indicators are derived from the Postsecondary Student Information System (PSIS) and selected tax variables from the T1 Family File (T1FF) and the Administrative Personal Income Masterfile (APIM). Using both PSIS and tax data, eleven graduating cohorts from the 2010 to 2020 calendar years were derived for the 2024 release.

Using British Columbia Ministry of Education administrative school data within the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform, this study compared the proportions of high school graduates among Grade 12 students with and without special needs across nine cohorts from 2010/2011 to 2018/2019 before and after controlling for several sociodemographic characteristics. Two major strengths of this study were the use of longitudinal administrative education data integrated with income tax data from the T1 Family File and the further disaggregation of the special education needs categorization. Students with special needs in all different categories (excluding those with gifted status) were less likely to have graduated across all nine cohorts compared with students without special needs, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and academic achievement, suggesting that students with special needs may face other types of barriers in completing high school. Yet there was diversity among students with special needs, with the highest proportions of graduation among students with learning disabilities or those with sensory needs and the lowest among students with intellectual disabilities. A larger share of females than males graduated high school among students without special needs. However, sex differences were less consistent among students with special needs status (including students with gifted status). As expected, the proportions of graduation were significantly higher at age 19 compared with at age 18 or younger, with the differences being slightly higher among students with special needs (excluding those with gifted status; 5 to 10 percentage points) compared with those without special needs (3 to 7 percentage points). The largest age differences were observed among students with autism spectrum disorder, behavioural needs or mental illness, and those with physical needs across all nine cohorts.

Direct Admissions is a system developed and piloted recently in the US that defaults graduating high school students into post-secondary admittance by data-matching their profiles (transcripts, standardized test scores, and prerequisites) with institutions' preset eligibility criteria. As applicant and institutional interest in direct admissions has increased significantly in recent (post-pandemic) years, demand is growing for direct admissions service providers. This new report provides a brief overview of the background, research, and implementation of direct admissions in the US. While direct admissions remains a new and largely experimental approach to admissions, it shows promise in making higher education more accessible, particularly for systemically marginalized and historically underserved students.

This report examines the types of professional regulation in BC that interact with institutions and programs in the BC Transfer System, and assesses the extent to which professional regulation affects transfer activity within the BC Transfer System. While the potential exists for conflicts between program accreditation or practitioner licensing requirements and transfer credit mobility within the BC Transfer System, such conflicts are not a significant or frequent problem. However, conflicts between accreditation/licensing requirements and institutional practices may occur in other areas, such as admissions. Because the BC Transfer System is much more extensive and active than other post-secondary transfer systems, institutions and programs should ensure that accrediting bodies are aware of the requirements of BCTS membership and the BCTS' commitment to facilitating student mobility.

The purpose of this report is to examine and compare course outlines at BC Transfer System member institutions, and to provide recommendations for course outline content and format to facilitate request for transfer credit. This project examined course outlines and/or syllabi from 36 BC Transfer System member institutions, along with each institution's policies and procedures relating to the content and formatting of course outlines and syllabi. While there are consistencies in course outline content, the distinction between course outlines and syllabi is not always clear in policies and procedures. The report recommends establishing or clarifying this distinction, along with ensuring that both include the information most relevant to assessing transfer credit requests.

Systemic racism has and continues to impact the delivery of government programs and services in British Columbia (B.C.). To guide anti-racism research in the province, the B.C. government announced 10 anti-racism research priorities in 2023, with systemic racism in B.C.'s education system identified as one of them. This report describes progress made in an initial, preliminary phase of anti-racism research that aims to understand how students with special needs across racial groups are designated for education supports in the B.C. K-12 public education system. This research uses data from the BC Demographic Survey, which was conducted in 2023 and examined designation rates among students whose racial identity information was available through the BC Demographic Survey and who were enrolled in a B.C. school at any point over the past 10 years. Researchers found that special education funding designation rates varied across student racial identity groups, varied within special education funding designations, and that gifted designations also varied by racial identity. Findings can be used as a starting point for discussion and engagement with communities, education system partners, school districts and families and to guide further research into the systemic barriers faced by racialized students in B.C.

Evaluations of creative stories generated by large language models (LLMs) often focus on objective properties of the text, such as its style, coherence, and diversity. While these metrics are indispensable, they do not speak to a story's subjective, psychological impact from a reader's perspective. We introduce the Psychological Depth Scale (PDS), a novel framework rooted in literary theory that measures an LLM's ability to produce authentic and narratively complex stories that provoke emotion, empathy, and engagement. We empirically validate our framework by showing that humans can consistently evaluate stories based on PDS (0.72 Krippendorff's alpha). We also explore techniques for automating the PDS to easily scale future analyses. GPT-4o, combined with a novel Mixture-of-Personas (MoP) prompting strategy, achieves an average Spearman correlation of 0.51 with human judgment while Llama-3-70B with constrained decoding scores as high as 0.68 for empathy. Finally, we compared the depth of stories authored by both humans and LLMs. Surprisingly, GPT-4 stories either surpassed or were statistically indistinguishable from highly-rated human-written stories sourced from Reddit. By shifting the focus from text to reader, the Psychological Depth Scale is a validated, automated, and systematic means of measuring the capacity of LLMs to connect with humans through the stories they tell., Comment: EMNLP 2024

This report summarizes a comprehensive environmental scan of thirty-eight BC Transfer System post-secondary institutions' admissions processes and presents both current best practices in the system and opportunities to advance equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization (EDID) supports attached to institutional admissions policies and practices, with a focus on the removal of systemic barriers commonly faced by learners with disabilities. In centering disabled learners' admissions experiences, this project reviews, through an intersectional lens, the application of accessible design; clear policies, processes, and definitions; multiple means of assessment; and other supports within the BC post-secondary admissions context. The resultant analysis of accessibility elements in play at some BC institutions situates potential short-term, long-term, and transformative recommendations for more effective and inclusive admissions pathways that serve all learners.