“Some Reckoning of Gains Is Made”: Theories of Assessment in Alberta’s Child-Centred Curricula, 1936–1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians have suggested that Alberta’s child-centred curriculum known as the “Enterprise curriculum,” which was introduced in 1936, was not fully implemented because teachers struggled with assessment of students’ learning. This historical case study reveals that the program included a theory of assessment consisting of four major principles, consistent with a child-centred vision of curriculum and pedagogy. Moreover, it directed teachers towards resources and strategies that might have assisted them in shifting their assessment practices. In 1943, the Department of Education began to compromise this vision, resulting in revisions to the program that defined a role for traditional testing and grading practices within a pedagogically progressive paradigm. RésuméLes historiens ont postulé que le programme d’étude albertain centré sur l’enfant introduit en 1936 et connu sous le nom de « Enterprise curriculum » n’a pas été entièrement mis en œuvre parce que les enseignants ont eu du mal à évaluer l’apprentissage des élèves. La présente étude de cas révèle que le programme comprenait une théorie d’évaluation reposant sur quatre grands principes en accord avec une pédagogie et une approche centrée sur l’enfant. De plus, cette théorie a orienté les enseignants vers des ressources et des stratégies susceptibles de les aider à changer leurs pratiques d’évaluation. En 1943, le département de l’Éducation a toutefois commencé à compromettre cette approche, ce qui a ouvert la porte à des pratiques traditionnelles d’évaluation et de classement dans un paradigme pédagogique progressif.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".