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 had the pleasure of 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. Our team made several important discoveries which we hope will continue to inform practices in the growing world of online science learning.
The core research team at ASU for these projects included myself, Profs. Jim Collins, Sara Brownell, and Ariel Anbar as well as Associate Dean Paul LePore. I worked closely with Dr. K. Supriya and the project at large also included several of Prof. Brownell's graduate and undergraduate students.
Our first publication analyzed 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.
One theme of this work is that fully online STEM degree programs simultaneously help address longstanding issues in higher education and create new ones; and the net effect can be difficult to predict. Another instance of this theme are the experiences of students with disabilities. For some of these students, an online degree may be hugely beneficial. However, our concern was that the institutional supports for students might lag the real needs. Using institutional data, we studied the frequency with which students register with the disability resource center, the range of specific accommodations provided, and course grades. Our results show that students in the online program were substantially less likely to be enrolled with the disability resource center and were offered a narrower range of accommodations. However, in relative terms (i.e., compared to students without disabilities in their degree program), online students with disabilities perform better than in-person students with disabilities. Future work is needed, but this suggests that some students with disabilities may indeed be identifying this new learning modality as a good fit for their own needs and self-selecting into an online program. The study also reminds universities of the need to evolve their supports to meet evolving degree programs.
Finally, I also worked extensively with education researchers across multiple universities as part of the SEISMIC (Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses) collaboration. Led by University of Michigan professor Tim McKay, SEISMIC brought together ten large universities with the goal of conducting "parallel analyses" that would speak to the kinds of equity challenges that are, in fact, ubiquitous across these institutions. The projects varied in scope and focus. My own contributions included a study of the effects of systemic advantage on STEM course grades, a related study focused on upper division biology courses, an analysis of advanced placement credit and student success in gateway science courses, and a cluster analysis that sought to uncover instructor effects on grade equity.