Extension of Authority to Confer Bachelor of Education Degrees in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This retrospective policy study identified how and why authority to confer Bachelor of Education degrees was extended to private colleges in Alberta. Data collection consisted of document review and interviews with key actors who played important roles in the adoption of the policy change. The study had two foci: the process by which the King's University College in Edmonton was able to attain authority to confer BEd degrees, and on postsecondary policy change in Alberta using Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's (1993, 1997) Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACE). Two sources of the policy change were identified: local political pressures and international pressures for neoliberalization of public policy. The study confirmed the utility of the ACE to represent and explain the case study information on extension of authority to confer BEd degrees in Alberta. A significant finding was the intractability of the policy change due to opposition by a consensus of professional educators. Although educator elites anticipated additional extension of authority to confer BEd degrees and increasing privatization of the postsecondary education system, respondents opposing the policy change anticipated continuing resistance from educational stakeholders. This potential conflict has implications for teacher preparation, the practice of school administrators, and for education generally. Differentiation in teacher preparation that may result from a proliferation of BEd programs has quality control implications for the Teacher Certification Branch of the Department of Alberta Education and the Private Colleges Accreditation Board of Alberta.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".