Curriculum Reform Coverage in The Montreal Gazette: A Content Analysis of Two Phases of Implementation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2000, the province of Quebec launched a substantial curriculum reform combining a "back to basics" approach with progressive principles that drew some initial approval in the media. During its implementation, however, the reform became an increasingly contentious topic, culminating in the education minister publicly suggesting it was a failure less than a decade later. In order to identify and evaluate the leading sources of discord, this study looked at opinion statements about the curriculum reform appearing in The Montreal Gazette, and compared findings with the literature on educational change as well as key planning and policy documents. It found that discourse about the reform in The Gazette was largely negative in the years leading up to implementation at the elementary level, and pessimism intensified ahead of the later implementation at the secondary level, as did misinformation about the reform's principles and practices. Furthermore, many of the contested aspects were anticipated by the literature. At minimum, improved communication and collaboration seems necessary in order to nurture the dissemination of the new philosophy of education and the pedagogical practices it entails, and to prevent the reform from falling victim to premature perceptions that it has altogether failed.
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 | 0.011 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".