CAREER: Data Analytics for Equity: Supporting STEM Faculty to Address Implicit Bias in the Classroom

该项目将研究数据可视化如何帮助大学教师认识到他们的隐性偏见，并促进他们在课堂上的公平参与。参与是学习的关键部分，但内隐偏见可能导致不同群体的学生参与STEM课堂的机会不同。这种差异可能导致学习结果的不平等，可能导致女性、有色人种学生和其他群体在STEM劳动力中的代表性不足。通过研究如何为STEM教师提供有关其教学对学生参与的不同影响的有意义的数据，该项目有可能大规模改善STEM的教与学。该项目旨在产生支持STEM领域公平教学的专业发展方法和技术。在项目期间，数百名教师将获得这种专业发展，这反过来将影响数万名学生。该项目还将编制辅助材料，使大学专业开发人员和教师教育工作者能够有效地为他们所服务的教育工作者提供类似的专业发展。这项工作的预期成果包括关于STEM公平教学的新知识，帮助教师更公平地教学的有效方法，以及这些方法的广泛传播。该项目将通过使用（并进一步增强）课堂观察工具——电子教学质量协议（EQUIP），直接支持100多名教师解决内隐偏见。EQUIP是一个免费的、基于网络的课堂观察工具，它提供了不同社会标记群体课堂参与的视觉表现。该研究计划包括对一部分教师进行纵向研究，因为他们通过三种干预措施从事持续的专业发展：(1)数据可视化的系统设计；(2)暑期学院；(3)教师学习社区。通过混合方法的研究设计，该项目将围绕STEM教师如何解释数据可视化，专业发展如何利用可视化来减少偏见和改善教学，以及由此产生的对学生成绩影响的性质等基础研究课题进行研究。这些方法将结合学科内部和学科之间的比较，三角测量数据，包括：课堂观察、数据分析、学生成绩、调查和访谈。本项目的主要理论贡献是发展数据可视化如何改善公平教学实践的知识，并纵向研究教师在学习识别和解决教学中的隐性偏见时所经历的过程。该项目可以为扩大STEM的参与做出重大贡献，因为它解决了内隐偏见，这是一个普遍存在的问题，限制了女性、有色人种学生、不同能力的人以及其他未被充分代表的群体参与STEM。帮助参与研究的教师解决他们的偏见，有望直接在本科STEM中创造更公平的学习环境。此外，通过记录和传播一套解决偏见和改善公平的工具和最佳做法，该项目将为教育工作者的专业发展工作做出广泛贡献。教师早期职业发展（Career）计划是美国国家科学基金会（NSF）范围内的一项活动，旨在支持有潜力在研究和教育中成为学术榜样的早期职业教师。本项目由美国国家科学基金会教育与人力资源理事会核心研究项目和改进本科STEM教育项目资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will study how data visualizations may help university faculty recognize their implicit biases and promote equitable participation in their classrooms. Participation is a key part of learning, but implicit biases can result in different opportunities for different groups of students to participate in STEM classrooms. Such differences can cause inequities in learning outcomes that may lead to underrepresentation of women, students of color, and other groups in the STEM workforce. By studying how to provide STEM faculty with meaningful data about the differential impact of their teaching on student participation, this project has the potential to improve teaching and learning in STEM at scale. This project aims to generate professional development methods and technologies that support equitable teaching across STEM fields. During the project, hundreds of faculty members will receive this professional development, which in turn will impact tens of thousands of students. The project will also develop supporting materials to enable university professional developers and teacher educators to effectively provide similar professional development to the educators they serve. Expected outcomes of this work include new knowledge about equitable teaching in STEM, effective methods for helping instructors teach more equitably, and widespread dissemination of these methods. This project will directly support over 100 faculty to address implicit bias, by utilizing (and further enhancing) the classroom observation tool, Electronic Quality of Instruction Protocol (EQUIP). EQUIP is a free, web-based classroom observation tool that provides visual representations of classroom participation by different social marker groups. The research plan includes a longitudinal study of a subset of faculty members as they engage in sustained professional development through three interventions: (1) systematic design of data visualizations; (2) a summer institute; and (3) faculty learning communities. Through a mixed-methods research design, this project will address fundamental research topics around how STEM faculty interpret data visualizations, how professional development may leverage visualizations to reduce bias and improve teaching, and the nature of the resulting impacts on student outcomes. The methods will utilize a combination of within- and between-subject comparisons, triangulating data from: classroom observations, data analytics, student outcomes, surveys, and interviews. The major theoretical contributions of this project are to develop knowledge about how data visualizations may improve equitable teaching practices, and to longitudinally study the process through which faculty members go as they learn to recognize and address implicit bias in their teaching. This project can contribute significantly to broadening participation in STEM, because it addresses implicit bias, which is a pervasive problem that limits the participation of women, students of color, people with differing abilities, and other underrepresented groups in STEM. Helping the faculty who participate in the study address their biases is expected to directly produce more equitable learning environments in undergraduate STEM. Moreover, this project will contribute broadly to educator professional development efforts, by documenting and disseminating a suite of tools and best practices for addressing bias and improving equity. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-wide activity that supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. This CAREER project is supported by NSF's Education & Human Resources Directorate Core Research Program and its Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.