Higher education struggles to develop practices and policies informed by disaggregated data and digital learning equity remains out of reach.
DEIA

Report illuminates barriers to equity in digital learning for underrepresented students


Higher education struggles to develop practices and policies informed by disaggregated data

For example:

  • It illuminates differences within groups, illuminates what is and isn’t effective to support specific groups of students, and elevates the voices and experiences of individual students.
  • It empowers faculty to refine teaching practices and develop data-informed partnerships across their institutions.
  • It empowers institutions to confront the effects of systemic inequities.

The report also includes background and context on related issues such as the various ways “first generation” is defined and how historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities provide models for equity-centered institutional culture.

“The voices of the students and other experts we talked to bring home the enormous variety obscured in the racial, ethnic, and economic categories that higher ed has relied on and why accounting for that variety can enable success for every student,” said report researcher and author Robert McGuire of McGuire Editorial & Consulting.

“Readers will get a comprehensive breakdown of how disaggregation of data matters across campuses, from course design and classroom practices to strategy and budgeting. Higher ed has been giving serious attention to equity for minoritized, poverty-affected, and first-generation students, and we hope this report helps advance those conversations in ways that are more informed by data.”

Though the report advocates the need to balance disaggregated and localized data with making space to hear how students bring specific facets of their identities to learning, it does not offer a comprehensive methodology for doing so. Rather, it tries to specify and illustrate why breaking apart the monolithic view of those students matters, and how doing so could advance high-level conversations about equity and learning.

This press release originally appeared online on the Every Learner Everywhere site.

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Laura Ascione
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