Inclusive Excellence

Most of my research examines how science education can be made more effective, but effectiveness only partially captures the overall mission of a university or other school. It is equally important that high quality education is equitably provided. I am currently working with a team at ASU funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Inclusive Excellence program to study ASU's growing online degree and course offerings in order to understand whether they are providing inclusive excellence.

I recently co-authored a paper with this group analyzing the grade equity of the online biology degree program at ASU—the first study to directly compare equivalent online and in-person degree programs. Overall, our findings show that the online students earn substantially lower grades than comparable in-person students and that the demographic-based grade differences observed in-person are mostly reproduced online. These findings have several implications for the future of these online STEM degree programs. First, although these online programs are increasing the accessibility of STEM degrees, this access will be hollow if the outcomes are not equivalent to in-person programs. Second, the fact that demographic-based grade differences are largely reproduced online highlights the systemic drivers of grade inequity and should prompt similarly systemic solutions.

With the same group of co-authors, we also examined some of the consequences to students of the COVID-19 pandemic-related shift to remote learning. In that study we found that, although course grades actually increased following this instructional change, students generally reported negative impacts on their learning and a diminishment of their overall educational experience.

I am continuing to do research on this theme. Research papers currently in preparation include a study of how students with disabilities are supported in a fully online degree program and multi-institution studies examining the variation (or lack thereof) of educational inequity between large research universities.