Successes and failures in curriculum reforms: a case study of Québec’s system-wide curriculum reform (1996-2022)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The quest to have a highly performing education system is one shared by many nations. In this sense, nations and jurisdictions will often analyze and compare their education system with others to optimize their own. Upon such analyses and comparisons, there will often be a need for reforms to increase performance and efficiency in education. Such reforms may be small-scale at times, but governments around the world will sometimes attempt system-wide curriculum reforms. In 1996 the province of Québec held a large commission called the “États Généraux de l’Éducation” (General Status of Education) to correct certain issues, most notably a higher dropout rate than other provinces in the country. After this commission, Québec undertook a system-wide curriculum reform based on a socio-constructivist approach. It was highly contested from the beginning and remains so to this day. This research project therefore aims to gain a better understanding of the successes and failures of system-wide curriculum reforms by looking into Québec’s reform in a case-study analysis. Results of this research indicate that top-down leadership, where a reform is imposed by a governing authority and in which teachers and the community do not have an active participation role produce higher levels of resistance than when change starts from the bottom up. This case-study analysis points to the notion that the preparation phase of a system-wide reform should be longer and given more importance than the implementation phase as understanding of the reason for this reform, or lack thereof, caused the most insecurity and resistance. Keyword: Education, reform, Québec, leadership, teamwork, reform planning.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".