Tensions and fissures: the politics of standardised testing and accountability in Ontario, 1995–2015
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT While Ontario has received international accolades for its enactment of province‐wide standardised testing upon the formation of the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), a closer look at provincial assessments over a 20‐year span reveals successes as well as systemic tensions and fissures. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a socio‐historical account of EQAO policy and programme enactment. Second, it offers insight into the less‐publicised politics of enactment within systems with respect to principles and methods of accountability and their link to instructional systems. Data and findings from various sources shed light on the realities of struggles, tensions in macro‐political consensus and dissensus among various stakeholders, and the micro‐politics at the school and district levels.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".