What Events in Canadian History Are Most Significant? A Survey of History Teachers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historical significance is one of the most fundamental and inescapable aspects of history and history education. History teachers make countless decisions about the historical significance of events in their daily practice, but little research has focused on the criteria that history teachers use to decide which events in Canadian history are historically significant, the events in Canadian history teachers rate as most historically significant, and the demographic factors that influence their historical significance ratings. This article focuses on the results of a survey in which English- and French-speaking teachers currently teaching Canadian history in a Canadian K–12 school, Collège d’enseignement general et professionnel (in Quebec), or college or university (n = 270) rated the historical significance of one hundred events in Canadian history, selected three factors that most influenced their ratings, and answered various demographic questions. The results suggest that teachers utilize historical and educational criteria to assess the historical significance of events, that their historical significance ratings were temporally and theoretically diverse, and that demographic factors have more influence on their historical significance ratings than the intellectual criteria they identified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 teacher head, 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".