An Analysis of the Québec History Examination: Validity and Historical Thinking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This document analysis examines how historical thinking is evaluated by the Ministry of Education history examination in Québec in 2015. High school students in Québec are required to pass this examination in order to receive their diploma. The Ministry examination claims to evaluate students’ historical knowledge and skills. Almost twenty years of Ministry of Education documents were analyzed using a historical methodology and two Ministry examinations were analyzed using a rubric derived from historical thinking criteria to answer the following questions: How has historical thinking influenced the history curriculum and the evaluation of history in the province of Québec? How is historical thinking reflected in the Québec Ministry examination? Analysis of the two examinations show that they are a limited tool for evaluating historical thinking and are instead focused on evaluating historical content knowledge. The current Ministry examination generally has some elements of four domains of historical thinking: evidence, cause and consequence, continuity and change and historical perspective. However, many of the questions only require students to answer at the recall level. Overall, there are few opportunities for students to demonstrate their advanced knowledge of historical thinking on the ministry examination.
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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 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".