Are writing questions in math fair?
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Abstract
In this paper we examine whether a student’s language background and other demographic factors have any relationship to their performance on prose questions in math, which we define as questions with open-ended answers containing one or more complete sentences of English. Prose questions stand in contrast to non-prose questions, which are more traditional questions in math courses, requiring an objective answer, such as a number, an equation, a diagram, etc. Performing an exploratory analysis on n=463 students in a first-year linear algebra course, we use a step-down regression to identify significant factors contributing to a student’s non-prose tilt (how much better a student performs on non-prose vs. prose questions). We find gender is the only significant factor contributing to a student’s non-prose tilt . In particular, no linguistic factors we considered, including whether or not a student was a native English speaker, emerged as significant.
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