Education Technology and Childcare Towards Equitable Opportunity

Abstract

In essential social services like education, limited resources can lead to misallocation or inefficient use, resulting in unequal service quality across individuals. This dissertation examines detailed operational and managerial issues in education and childcare contexts, with a focus on identifying and addressing widespread disparities that have been overlooked by industry practitioners and policymakers. Combining large-scale data analytics, natural language processing, and causal inference techniques, the dissertation examines three key influencers of equity in personal development, corresponding to the three chapters: equitable allocation of education resources, equitable application of new education technology, and equitable access to essential childcare services.

Equitable Allocation of Education Resources: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms bring education resources to traditionally-disadvantaged learners such as women. However, whether all learners are treated in equitable manner by the teaching staff on the platform remains an unanswered question. In Chapter 1, we utilize a large-scale, interaction-level dataset on 174 courses on Coursera to uncover an economically sizable and statistically significant disparity between male and female learners in receiving responses to their posts in MOOC discussion forums. Our results are most consistent with a male-driven, gender homophily mechanism. We additionally show that receiving staff response leads to significant improvement in course passing rates, particularly for female learners. Therefore, the unequal access to information through course forums unfavorably hinders female learners' performance. We suggest platforms and content providers to incorporate a de-gendered design in online discussion forums and provide staff training that highlights gender-neutral interactions.

Equitable Application of New Education Technology: The widespread adoption of online grading systems brings convenience to professors and graders, but may post new threads to the equitable grading among all students. In Chapter 2, we present an analysis of over 30 million Canvas grading records from a large public university, revealing a significant bias in sequential grading tasks. We find that assignments graded later in the sequence tend to receive (1) lower grades, (2) comments that are notably more negative and less polite, and (3) more post-grade questions from students. Furthermore, we show that the system design of Canvas, which pre-orders submissions by student surnames, transforms the sequential bias into a significant disadvantage for students with alphabetically lower-ranked surname initials. This surname initial disparity is observed across a wide range of subjects, and is more prominent in social science and humanities as compared to engineering, science and medicine. The assignment-level surname disparity aggregates to a course-level surname disparity of students' grade points and can potentially lead to inequitable job opportunities.

Equitable Access to Essential Childcare Services: The availability of essential educational services, such as childcare, not only shapes equitable opportunities for young children but also significantly influences the career development prospects of their working parents. In Chapter 3, we leverage nationwide, large-scale job profile data of workers in US knowledge industries from 1997 to 2019 and variations of state-level childcare licensing regulations to investigate the causal impact of nearby childcare availability on individual-level job departure outcomes. Our results suggest that higher nearby childcare availability leads to lower likelihood of turnover for US knowledge workers. The effect is consistent across major occupations, and is larger for female, early-career, and highly-educated workers. Our study highlights the critical role of proximity to childcare services in talent retention and workplace equity, offering policy implications for employers and policymakers.