Race and Gender Bias in Online Courses

[SummerMadness]

Race and Gender Bias in Online Courses

Many proponents of online education have speculated that the digital learning environment might be a meritocracy, where students are judged not on their race or gender, but on the comments they post.

A study being released today by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, however, finds that bias appears to be strong in online course discussions.

The study found that instructors are 94 percent more likely to respond to discussion forum posts by white male students than by other students. The authors write that they believe their work is the first to demonstrate with a large pool that the sort of bias that concerns many educators in face-to-face instruction is also present in online education.

The study looked at discussion forums in 124 massive open online courses (all were provided on a single MOOC platform that the paper does not identify, citing confidentiality requirements). The researchers created fictional student accounts, with names that most would identify as being either white, black, Indian or Chinese, with male and female names for each racial/ethnic group.

Over all, instructors responded to 7 percent of comments posted by students. But for white male students, the response rate was 12 percent.

 

[Bio-Luminescent Billy]

Oh noes, the horororor!!!

 

[Bio-Luminescent Billy]

So, researchers (Trolls) make literal sock puppet accounts to play mind games on people to establish some sort of bias in an online course?

Well, if those "researchers" were Russian, we might have to investigate them for manipulating our education system.

 

[SummerMadness]

So, researchers (Trolls) make literal sock puppet accounts to play mind games on people to establish some sort of bias in an online course?

Well, if those "researchers" were Russian, we might have to investigate them for manipulating our education system.

If you have a problem with the methodology, please explain what is wrong with that methodology specifically and how such methodology should not be used (despite it being used to evaluate different industries). Moreover, they do not establish bias, please explain how they establish bias.

 

[Bio-Luminescent Billy]

If you have a problem with the methodology, please explain what is wrong with that methodology specifically and how such methodology should not be used (despite it being used to evaluate different industries). Moreover, they do not establish bias, please explain how they establish bias.

I don't even care if there is a bias. Maybe they don't reply so much to these "Minority" names because they don't want to trigger some lunatic and have to deal with that nonsense.

If you're going to make race the end all, be all or every topic, don't be surprised when people choose their own tribe. It's called survival.

We are not afflicted with post modernist nihilism.

 

[SummerMadness]

I don't even care if there is a bias. Maybe they don't reply so much to these "Minority" names because they don't want to trigger some lunatic and have to deal with that nonsense.

If you're going to make race the end all, be all or every topic, don't be surprised when people choose their own tribe. It's called survival.

We are not afflicted with post modernist nihilism.

You do not care if there is bias, then you are arguing the society is not an equal society. Understandable, you simply support this because it provides you with unearned benefits, thus you feel threatened by being equal to everyone else. Nonetheless, you made a criticism of this study, yet have not articulated what is wrong with their methodology. It appears, you have simply changed the subject to voice support for racial and gender discrimination.

 

[Gadarene]

Did they do any analysis on the contents of the comments that were actually being posted as well?

 

[Bio-Luminescent Billy]

You do not care if there is bias, then you are arguing the society is not an equal society. Understandable, you simply support this because it provides you with unearned benefits, thus you feel threatened by being equal to everyone else. Nonetheless, you made a criticism of this study, yet have not articulated what is wrong with their methodology. It appears, you have simply changed the subject to voice support for racial and gender discrimination.

I support equal opportunity, not equal results.

What unearned benefits?

The study relies on a host of subjective interpretation of information, and assumes the reason and motive of people they don't know IRL, and who communicating through in deceptive fashion.

It's a looking for something to complain about.

It's funny, in fact. I made a extensive post about boosting support and attendance of these very groups to keep people from wasting their lives and money at universities, about a month ago on 8chan.

And here comes this hit piece claiming these groups are all biased and everything, and clearly they have to diversify more and be more inclusive and make people sound more like...you.

When did they start their research?

 

[PloverWing]

SummerMadness: Thanks for the pointer to the paper. I haven't had time to read it yet, but I'll plan to look through it. As a college professor, I try to pay attention to my unconscious biases all the time, to make sure I'm not favoring one student over another because of gender, ethnicity, etc. I still catch hidden biases in myself, and it's important to me to learn and improve.

 

[Bio-Luminescent Billy]

SummerMadness: Thanks for the pointer to the paper. I haven't had time to read it yet, but I'll plan to look through it. As a college professor, I try to pay attention to my unconscious biases all the time, to make sure I'm not favoring one student over another because of gender, ethnicity, etc. I still catch hidden biases in myself, and it's important to me to learn and improve.

And this is why I tell people to avoid colleges like the plague.

I can't imagine carrying around that baggage.

 

[PloverWing]

And this is why I tell people to avoid colleges like the plague.

I can't imagine carrying around that baggage.

Dealing with the baggage of one's own implicit biases, and making an effort to overcome them, is part of the hard but important work of loving one's neighbor as one's self. It's especially important for people in positions of authority, like college professors or business managers.

In your own workplace, don't you try to detect and overcome your own hidden biases, so that you can treat your co-workers and customers fairly?

 

[Rion]

Did they do any analysis on the contents of the comments that were actually being posted as well?

Shh, you're interrupting the entertainment.

 

[Bio-Luminescent Billy]

Dealing with the baggage of one's own implicit biases, and making an effort to overcome them, is part of the hard but important work of loving one's neighbor as one's self. [

The perfect merging of Christian martyr complex and social justice to achieve our pathological altruisic utopia.

It's especially important for people in positions of authority, like college professors or business managers.

In your own workplace, don't you try to detect and overcome your own hidden biases, so that you can treat your co-workers and customers fairly?

I treat people as individuals. I don't need to overcome biases. I just don't go around with turrets syndrome screaming out epithets...not that that doesn't sound widely funny.

 

[PloverWing]

Did they do any analysis on the contents of the comments that were actually being posted as well?

I'm still just skimming the paper, but it looks like they randomly assigned names to comments, so that they're taking that issue into account.

 

[Ana the Ist]

In your own workplace, don't you try to detect and overcome your own hidden biases, so that you can treat your co-workers and customers fairly?

Well...if they're hidden biases, he can't detect them. Even if testing can make someone aware of them, research shows that being aware of them doesn't change them.

Most importantly, further research has shown they don't actually affect behavior very much.

 

[SummerMadness]

SummerMadness: Thanks for the pointer to the paper. I haven't had time to read it yet, but I'll plan to look through it. As a college professor, I try to pay attention to my unconscious biases all the time, to make sure I'm not favoring one student over another because of gender, ethnicity, etc. I still catch hidden biases in myself, and it's important to me to learn and improve.

It's always good to understand where our implicit biases lie and work at reducing them. One of the simplest ways to remove these biases is integration of neighborhoods and schools; however, one the problems with reducing such segregation is addressing the "colorblind" racism of people arguing that it is not a problem if someone only wants to live around white people or someone only wants to live around black people (in surveys on such living conditions, there is a racial divide regarding favor for segregated neighborhoods). But it makes perfect sense, when everyone is interacting, developing biases about other groups is reduced. Nonetheless, there are still issues with integration, namely instituting practices like tracking, which still results in unfair discrimination. I think one crucial element in reducing these problem is for more white people to stop attributing practices to other groups that they are themselves perpetuating; for instance, if all the black kids are sitting at the same lunch table, they are said to be self-segregating, but this is never said of all the white kids sitting at the same lunch table. Surveys of people's feelings about housing integration, busing, interracial marriage, etc., reveals which groups really are self-segregating, and it's only when we address that bias can we start to chip away at the implicit bias (which simply begins to vanish as people interact with people of different backgrounds).

 

[PloverWing]

Well...if they're hidden biases, he can't detect them. Even if testing can make someone aware of them, research shows that being aware of them doesn't change them.

Most importantly, further research has shown they don't actually affect behavior very much.

Do you have references to the research you have in mind?

 

[Ana the Ist]

Do you have references to the research you have in mind?

Here you go...

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Implicit/238807

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard, and the University of Virginia examined 499 studies over 20 years involving 80,859 participants that used the IAT and other, similar measures. They discovered two things: One is that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought. They also conclude that there is very little evidence that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior. These findings, they write, "produce a challenge for this area of research."

So the takeaway here is that there's somewhere between very little, and no correlation between implicit biases and behavior.

I understand that people have made a big deal out of this implicit bias stuff for the past 5 years or so...but you gotta remember 1 thing...

People are idiots.

 

[SummerMadness]

Do you have references to the research you have in mind?

Off the top of my head, there is this paper that discusses implicit bias reduction: Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention

Here is another source discussing ways to reduce bias: Four Ways Teachers Can Reduce Implicit Bias
How to Reduce Implicit Bias

But I also think another good read is a book by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, which overall is the discussion of colorblind frames used by people to maintain a racial hierarchy, but there is a chapter on the people that reject these frames and excuses (particularly with regard to interracial relationships), where growing up in a diverse neighborhood and interacting with people from other groups greatly reduced their bias. The one thing they also mentioned, which is something I've said in discussions before, is that the working class whites are all racist trope, is just hat a trope. When it comes to people that have fewer racist tendencies, they tend to be working class, but are almost all female.

 

[PloverWing]

Here you go...

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Implicit/238807

Thanks.

It looks like this article is criticizing the Implicit Association Test in particular. It's possible that the IAT isn't a good measure, and should be discarded in favor of some other measure.

It would be more troubling to me to see studies in which, say,
professors discovered that they were calling on students in category A twice as often as students in category B, and then the professors tried to correct their behavior, but were unable to correct it no matter what. This article doesn't seem to be addressing that kind of situation.