Quantifying Culturally Relevant Curriculum and Examining Its Relationships With Students' and Teachers' Race/Ethnicity and Gender

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Responsive Practices in the Policy Landscape of Curricular Mandates (Table 9)

Abstract

Culturally relevant curricula help students see themselves and others in the classroom, enriching their learning. The current study aims to 1) quantify the relevance of curriculum materials to different racial/ethnic and gender groups and 2) examine whether the relevance is associated with the students’ and teachers’ racial/ethnic and gender characteristics. The method capitalizes on a large sample of one million classrooms and applies a natural language processing (NLP) approach to quantifying the relevance of curriculum materials. We found variability in the relevance of curriculum materials for different groups, and the variations are strongly associated with students' and teachers' racial/ethnic and gender characteristics. Our study is a first step to evaluating culturally relevant teaching at scale using NLP methods.

Authors

• Zixi Chen, NYU Shanghai
  Presenting Author

• Bodong Chen, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joseph Konstan, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sashank Varma, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Non-Presenting Author