An Historical Examination of the Secondary Mathematics Curriculum in Ontario Through Two Lenses: Curriculum Policy Documents and Reflections of Leaders in the Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The secondary mathematics curriculum in Ontario has gone through many revisions and renewals during the past 60 years. Current curriculum and policy documents are readily available, yet previous documents are not easily accessible. There is a dearth of literature on historical changes to the Ontario secondary math curriculum, especially from the perspective of the mathematics education leaders. By performing a document analysis of historical secondary mathematics curriculum in Ontario and then interviewing mathematics leaders who have been involved in several change/revision processes, this descriptive study seeks to document the changes to and influences on the Ontario secondary mathematics curriculum since the 1960s. This study identified keys trends in changes to Ontario mathematics curriculum documents. These trends include an increased focus on teaching methodologies within the document, removal of topics such as conics and proofs with the reduction of the secondary program to four years and an overall increased focus on calculus. By contrasting document changes to both previous literature and interviews conducted in this study, possible triggering events, such as mathematical movements or new political parties elected, were identified for each curriculum revision. By comparing and contrasting experiences of leaders with existing literature suggestions for future curriculum revisions processes are proposed such as a provincial scoping survey prior to the start of the writing process and sufficient time for field testing and implementation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".