When Theory and Practice Meet: The Implications of Provincial Standardized Exams on Secondary School Education in Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec acknowledges the critical nature of equipping students for the complexities of the 21st century. In doing so they recognize the necessity for education to help “all students develop skills that will enable them to become well-educated individuals, active citizens and competent workers” (MELS, 2007). While the efficacy of standardized assessment practices constitutes significant debate, research on the implications of standardized assessment is less common. Possible implications can be more specifically examined through the lens of teaching and learning as it relates to the ambitions of Canadian education. As education is provincially legislated in Canada, the unique circumstances of Québec educators and the provincial Ministry examinations remain to be explored. This study serves to do just that. Through a qualitative, ethnographic approach this study aims to create a deeper understanding of the implications of Québec’s provincial Ministry exams. The study investigates these implications more specifically on secondary instruction, teaching autonomy and student readiness for the future. This research sought to connect both administrator and teacher voices in a way which develops the understanding of the in-school implications of provincial exam implementation on teaching and learning in relation to the goals outlined by the Québec Education Program (QEP). Data was collected for this study through semi-structured virtual interviews with four administrator and three teacher participants within six Québec secondary schools. A thematic analysis was used to identify commonalities between educator experiences. The findings suggest participants perceive the implementation of Ministry exams to have various problematic implications on teaching and learning opportunities. There are five conceptual themes constructed within the findings. The first theme explores explicit exam-influenced learning. The participants in the study detail the rigorous endeavor of exam preparation which includes exam-specific tools and skills felt necessary to equip students for exam success. The second theme, Time Starved Schools, highlights the impact of such extensive exam preparation approaches on an already time-pressed instructional year. The third theme considers the pressure on educators implementing high-stakes exams through the lens of professional accountability and responsibility. The fourth theme, Conflicting Philosophies of Learning, speaks to the divide in philosophical underpinnings between present-day instruction and learning and those conveyed through the Ministry exams. Finally, the fifth theme speaks to educators' ideas of student readiness for life beyond secondary school, and how the Ministry exams fall short in creating opportunities for students to employ highly valued skills necessary for future success. This study accentuates the lived experiences of those responsible for implementing Québec Ministry exams and how the current approach to such misses the mark in aligning curriculum standards with complementary assessment tools. This study contributes to research in the field of both Québec and broader Canadian education and assessment approaches through the perspectives of educators. Valuable considerations for future research would entail expanding the sample size to encompass more educator voices. Through continuing to connect the network of Canadian educators while highlighting the implications of standardized assessment on teaching and learning, I strive to find constructive solutions to better facilitate student success
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".