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Bias Affects Instructors’ Interactions With Online Students, Study Finds

By  Emma Kerr
March 7, 2018

Instructors are nearly twice as likely to respond to comments from white male students in online courses than to those from any other race-gender combination, a new Stanford University study finds.

Setting out to determine whether there was racial or gender bias in online learning environments, researchers drew from several hundred actual student comments in massive open online courses and came up with a list of 32 generic comments that they could post in discussion forums. The comments were assigned names that suggested a gender and race or nationality — white, black, Indian, or Chinese — and then randomly placed in the discussion boards of 124 MOOCs. The courses were offered by an unnamed “major provider” in 2014, and the subjects included accounting, calculus, epidemiology, teaching, and computer programming.

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Instructors are nearly twice as likely to respond to comments from white male students in online courses than to those from any other race-gender combination, a new Stanford University study finds.

Setting out to determine whether there was racial or gender bias in online learning environments, researchers drew from several hundred actual student comments in massive open online courses and came up with a list of 32 generic comments that they could post in discussion forums. The comments were assigned names that suggested a gender and race or nationality — white, black, Indian, or Chinese — and then randomly placed in the discussion boards of 124 MOOCs. The courses were offered by an unnamed “major provider” in 2014, and the subjects included accounting, calculus, epidemiology, teaching, and computer programming.

The researchers observed the interactions of the instructors and the real students with the fictional ones. Even in the absence of any visual identifiers, avatars, or face-to-face interactions, instructors were far more likely, 94 percent, to respond to questions if the name suggested the student was a white male, compared with any of the other race-gender combinations. The study found no evidence of biases in student responses to fictional students’ posts. But posts by white women were more likely to receive a response from white female students.

The type of question or comment mattered. Those that were coded as “advising” or “social” questions — “Is this class harder or easier than other classes in this field?” or “Where are people in this class from?” — resulted in starkly different levels of responses from instructors. When instructors answered questions that were “completion focused” — “Are there links to other resources that could be helpful for the lessons?”, for example — the disparities by race and gender were less striking, though still present. This is, in part, why researchers argue instructors sometimes act on unconscious stereotypes, said Thomas S. Dee, one of the study’s researchers and a professor of education at Stanford University. He theorized instructors may feel more comfortable venturing outside the course material in discussions to advise students who more closely resemble themselves.

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“I think the instructors are very well intentioned. I don’t think they are racist or misogynist in any way. But like all of us, they suffer from this behavioral phenomenon where we react in implicitly biased ways,” he said in an interview. “It also should say something to all postsecondary instructors, because there’s quite a bit of evidence that these implicit biases are part of the human condition.”

While some scholars have questioned the link between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior, the Stanford researchers argue that their study is especially important now, as increasing numbers of students enroll in online courses. In 2016 more than 31 percent of all postsecondary students took at least one online course, and “despite their rapid growth, we currently know relatively little about the challenges and opportunities for promoting equity in these digital learning spaces,” the researchers wrote.

The research was also conducted by Rachel Baker and Brent Evans, assistant professors of education at the University of California at Irvine and Vanderbilt University, respectively, and June John, a doctoral student at Stanford University.

A majority of courses surveyed were STEM courses and more than half were taught by one or multiple white male instructors. Most of the courses were offered at four-year institutions.

A version of this article appeared in the March 16, 2018, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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