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One of the long term goals of any college or university is increasing the student retention. The negative impact of student dropout are clear to students, parents, universities and society. The positive effect of decreasing student…
Higher educational institutions constantly look for ways to meet students' needs and support them through graduation. Recent work in the field of learning analytics have developed methods for grade prediction and course recommendations.…
Math placement is a crucial step between admission and full engagement with the university for students in STEM majors. Students' placement experiences influence not only their mathematical entry point on their degree pathway, but their…
Students' perception of excessive difficulty in STEM degrees lowers their motivation and therefore affects their performance. According to prior research, the use of gamification techniques promote engagement, motivation and fun when…
Early-life environments can have long-lasting developmental effects. Interestingly, research on how school reforms affect later-life study behavior has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigated a staggered school reform…
Artificial intelligence systems, especially those using machine learning, are being deployed in domains from hiring to loan issuance in order to automate these complex decisions. Judging both the effectiveness and fairness of these AI…
Academic meritocracy is jeopardized by systematic imbalances; for example, whereas Black and Hispanic individuals constitute over 30% of the U.S. population, they represent fewer than 10% of tenured academics in science and engineering.…
Students from different socioeconomic backgrounds exhibit persistent gaps in test scores, gaps that can translate into unequal educational and labor-market outcomes later in life. In many assessments, performance reflects not only what…
The field of e-learning has emerged as a topic of interest in academia due to the increased ease of accessing the Internet using using smart-phones and wireless devices. One of the challenges facing e-learning platforms is how to keep…
Urban income segregation is a widespread phenomenon that challenges societies across the globe. Classical studies on segregation have largely focused on the geographic distribution of residential neighborhoods rather than on patterns of…
Bias exists in how we pick leaders, who we perceive as being influential, and who we interact with, not only in society, but in organizational contexts. Drawing from leadership emergence and social influence theories, we investigate…
The large-scale online management systems (e.g. Moodle), online web forums (e.g. Piazza), and online homework systems (e.g. WebAssign) have been widely used in the blended courses recently. Instructors can use these systems to deliver class…
Concerns about representation in computing within the U.S. have driven numerous activities to broaden participation. Assessment of the impact of these efforts and, indeed, a clear assessment of the actual "problem" being addressed are…
Efforts to promote equity in higher education often rely on shared intent among instructors and students. Yet, as demonstrated in this study, when students form their own teams for Team-Based Learning (TBL) tasks, they unintentionally…
This paper investigates the distribution of public school expenditures across U.S. school districts using a bayesian maximum entropy model. Covering the period 2000-2016, I explore how inter-jurisdictional competition and household choice…
We study fairness in classification, where individuals are classified, e.g., admitted to a university, and the goal is to prevent discrimination against individuals based on their membership in some group, while maintaining utility for the…
Uncovering how inequality emerges from human interaction is imperative for just societies. Here we show that the way social groups interact in face-to-face situations can enable the emergence of disparities in the visibility of social…
A recent paper by Salehi et al. claims that the differences found between major demographic groups on scores in introductory college physics tests are due to differences in pre-college preparation. No evidence is produced, however, to show…
Granovetter's "strength of weak ties" hypothesizes that isolated social ties offer limited access to external prospects, while heterogeneous social ties diversify one's opportunities. We analyze the most complete record of college student…
Most US school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask:…