Blended Learning Can Prevent Teacher Bias

An article from nymag.com talks about the different experiences beautiful people have compared to homely people. And it all starts in schools.

Apparently, teachers give preferential treatment to more attractive students. I actually saw this myself. My school had a ‘students of the month’ breakfast every month, where seven teachers would pick two students each, every month, and they’d all have a breakfast and talk about how wonderful everyone is. The first one I attended, I noticed something odd: nearly all the students there were better looking than the average junior high student. The trouble is, I don’t think those teachers were wrong to pick those students; in fact, many of them were also my students, and I knew them to work very hard. It’s all just a self-fulfilling prophecy. More attractive students are given more help, more opportunities to participate, more opportunities to make up work, and they become better students. By the time they reach junior high and high school, they’ve had far more help and have thus actually become good students.

The article continues to point out that later in life there’s a wage gap between the attractive and homely, comparable to the one between men and women, whites and minorities.

So where does blended learning fit into all of this? Blended learning can get rid of gender, race, and attractiveness bias. When your students are turning in their work digitally, the LMS can hide the students’ names, and the teacher will then grade work on its own merit and not on the teacher’s biases for or against the student. Very few assignments can truly be graded objectively, no matter how strong your rubric is. (Multiple choice and other single-answer questions are not quality assignments.) Digital work also prevents subject creep bias, which is a concept I invented right now where teachers grade for things that have almost nothing to do with the subject. For example, forgetting to put a name or a subject on a paper, or having issues spelling (spell-check isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing), or handwriting problems.

There is one potential downside to this: it prevents teachers from knowing their students’ work. Before I did anonymous grading, I enjoyed telling parents about specific projects their kid did.

To counter that, I often liked to print out some ‘best-of’ work. I’d download all submissions and just look through them, picking favorites. Once picked, I’d go back through and look at the file names to see who was doing a good job and who wasn’t, and that way I’d be able to brag to parents as well as look for specific students to try to correct where they went wrong.

Another counter is that I don’t think teachers should do a majority of the grading. I think TA’s or mentors or even other students should be doing grading, and the teacher can focus on designing awesome assignments and providing on-demand help with the subject he/she is an expert in.

What I’m saying is that in addition to the myriad reasons blended learning is good for schools, here’s another one: blended learning prevents teacher bias.