Underrepresented students face many significant challenges in their education. In particular, they often have a harder time than their peers from majority groups in building long-term high-quality study groups. This challenge is exacerbated in remote-learning scenarios, where students are unable to meet face-to-face and must rely on pre-existing networks for social support. We present a scalable system that removes structural obstacles faced by underrepresented students and supports all students in building inclusive and flexible study groups. One of our main goals is to make the traditionally informal and unstructured process of finding study groups for homework more equitable by providing a uniform but lightweight structure. We aim to provide students from underrepresented groups an experience that is similar in quality to that of students from majority groups. Our process is unique in that it allows students the opportunity to request group reassignments during the semester if they wish. Unlike other collaboration tools our system is not mandatory and does not use peer-evaluation. We trialed our approach in a 1000+ student introductory Engineering and Computer Science course that was conducted entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that students from underrepresented backgrounds were more likely to ask for group-matching support compared to students from majority groups. At the same time, underrepresented students that we matched into study groups had group experiences that were comparable to students we matched from majority groups. B-range students in high-comfort and high-quality groups had improved learning outcomes.
翻译:代表性不足的学生在教育中面临许多重大挑战,特别是,在建立长期高质量学习团体方面,他们往往比来自多数群体的同龄人在建立长期高质量学习团体方面要困难得多。这种挑战在远程学习情景中更加严重,学生无法面对面地面对,必须依靠先前存在的社会支持网络。我们提出了一个可扩缩的系统,消除代表性不足的学生面临的结构性障碍,并支持所有学生建立包容性和灵活的学习团体。我们的主要目标之一是通过提供统一但轻量级的结构,使传统上非正规和无结构的寻找学习团体以从事家庭作业的学习团体的过程更加公平。我们的目标是向来自代表性不足群体的学生提供质量与来自多数群体学生相同的经验。我们的过程是独特的,让学生有机会在半学期请求团体重新安排职位。我们系统与其他合作工具不同,不是强制性的,不使用同侪评价。我们试验了我们的方法,在1 000+学生入门的介绍工程和计算机科学课程中,在COVID-19大流行病期间完全在线进行。我们发现,来自代表性不足群体的学生更可能要求群体的学生获得与多数群体学生一样的高质量经验。我们从高比例群体学习团体学习到学生群体。