Equity

Equity is a commitment to providing individualized support and guidance to ensure inclusion and fairness in educational settings and services. Equity also addresses and removes unfair disadvantages and structural barriers to learning that are difficult or impossible for an individual person to navigate.

Definition

Equity is the commitment to identifying, intentionally addressing, and removing unfair disadvantages and barriers to learning for students.

Equity is similar to but different than the concept of equality, in which everyone is given the exact same resources and support. Instead, with equity, learners are provided the resources and support that they need to succeed, which may be more or less than other students receive. Although a learner may receive more support than another in an equity-based framework, the commitment to equity aligns with constructivist and active learning theories of education that specify that each individual's learning path and needs are individual and based on their prior experiences and backgrounds. Thus, equity commitments strive to ensure to that learning outcomes are achieved by all learners, regardless of their individual needs and

Additional Information

People start at different places in an educational experience. Some people have prior knowledge and experience that gives them an advantage toward completing the learning objectives, where other people may not have any related prior experiences. Additionally, structural and racial barriers may also exist to peoples' participation and success in learning experiences. Advantages do not necessarily mean that a learner is being unfair to other learners intentionally. Instead, it is useful from an equity in design perspective to identify, understand, and address any fairness issues and advantages that exist so that all learners can succeed.

Therefore, from a design perspective, equity is not a matter of condemning. It is instead is a matter of simply ensuring all learners can succeed in an educational experience.

Equity then involves the understanding what specialized paths and actions are needed for disadvantaged learners to not just achieve learning objectives, but also to succeed in their careers and life. A commitment to equity is a part of considering the audience's needs of a design during the planning phases of a project.

Actions for ensuring equity

There are multiple tasks that can be done to make educational products with a commitment to equity for all learners to participate and benefit. Although this list is not exhaustive, some of the actions that can be taken to improve equity in a design include:

• Proactive support of learners. Products can provide substantive support mechanisms and scaffolding for people of various skill levels and background experiences. A commitment to equity involves Teachers and tchnologies can also monitor learners' performance, and with this data, teachers can identify opportunities to support students when they need additional help.
• Addressing implicit biases. Designers should identify and address biases that are present in educational products, as well as in the contexts in which they are used. Many biases are implicit, in that they are not readily identified or known by the designers, implementers, or participants. The identification of implicit biases and unfair assumptions is typically done through mindful analysis and reflection of how people learn from the product and how they learn in the contexts in which the product is implemented.

• Identifying and addressing structural inequities. This aspect of equity considers the structural inequities that are present within an educational product, as well as how the product is situated in larger educational contexts (such as classrooms, schools, districts, and geographic locations). Sometimes, the structures of learning experiences are unfair without the designers intentionally knowing it. Equity attempts to identify and address such inequities to improve the fairness for all learners to actively participate and benefit from educational experiences.
• Integrating racial justice. This commitment is about making systemic inequities and racial biases visible and making productive changes to reduce these barriers to participation. Another aspect of integrating racial justice is in the proactive inclusion, acceleration, and A productive area of recent research and development in this area is in the field of antiracist design, which focuses on identifying and actively reversing racial and systemic barriers that are present within educational products and the educational system as a whole.

Equity in evaluation and assessment

It is also important to consider equity in the contexts of evaluation and assessment. When a person is evaluated for their learning, or how and why they participate with an educational product, evaluation plans should account for their cultural and personal backgrounds to better interpret the results of the evaluation.

Equity in evaluation and assessment is a commitment to fairness of evaluation instruments and methods and that they account for people's individual backgrounds, experiences, and needs.

Some evaluation approaches may be interpreted differently among diverse groups of people. As such, extra care should be taken to understand the impact that interpretation and understanding of testing materials has on individuals who are participating in evaluations. This is particularly true for assessments that become the foundation for letter grades and performance indicators that could in part determine what educational opportunities a person has available to them in the future.

Fairness in grading and evaluation is essential to enable every learner to maximize their learning from an educational product. Implicit biases and assumptions may be readily present in evaluation instruments, so it is useful for designers to investigate their instruments for such issues.

Finally, evaluators often remind people that the interpretation of data are just that - an interpretation. An individual's performance on a single test or their performance with a learning product does not reduce their whole humanity down to their performance or usage statistics. There is always more to the person than the data show, and a holistic read of the data and how and why people learn within different contexts can reveal more about a person's actual performance and potentially what some of the implicit assumptions about learners are.

Tips and Tricks

• Consider how you will identify who your learners are that will use your product and whether these learners are from traditionally underserved or marginalized groups. These insights will help you understand how these groups have historically faced challenges related to learning and how your product might be designed to address these challenges.
• Throughout your design processes, identify the implicit biases that are present in your plans. This will also likely involving people in your design team or soliciting feedback from groups that represent the audiences that your product serves. Seek out assumptions assumptions that your product makes about the audience and how these assumptions may or may not be related to barriers that your audience faces when they participate in educational activities.
• Think about how your product might readily adapt and provide scaffolds and supports to learners who are at different ability levels. An equitable product is first and foremost one where everybody can reasonably succeed, regardless of background or prior experience. This is related to the concept of differentiation in instruction and a first step toward ensuring equity.

Related Concepts

• Audience considerations of design
• Diversity
• Accessibility
• Ethics
• Scaffolding and support mechanisms
• Differentiation

Examples

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External Resources

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