University Researchers Create App to Battle ‘Implicit Biases’

This is not a joke; researchers at San DiegoState University and Michigan State University created a new app to help schoolteachers battle and overcome their own “implicit biases” of their students, according to Campus Reform. “Implicit biases” means that people have stereotypes of those they’re around and are biased in how they approach them. The app, called EQUIP (or Equity Quantified in Participation), pushes teachers to give all students a chance to participate. The idea behind it is to create more “equitable classrooms” across America.

How does it work? Teachers download their classroom roster into the app, and then the teachers can go and customize “social markers” of each student. These markers range from gender, race, and other similar traits. This alone raises the question of whether this is a breach of privacy on the part of teachers and administrators to input data of their students, who are underage. Another question that this app raises is whether parents have input of whether they can ask for exclusion of their children from being put into the app’s data.

Next, teachers select “aspects of classroom discourse” that they want to track, which can be any subject like history or science. The app then can offer data analytics on student participation based on these indicators. The researchers claim that this creates a more inclusive teaching of mathematics to students. One researcher, Daniel Reinholz, who is a math education professor at San Diego State, said “Math can be very non-inclusive sometimes, and seeing the inequities has made improving the system a motivation for my work.” He said that implicit bias can be subtle, while teaching math is complex, so this is a good middle ground.

It is as if Reinholz and the other university researchers do not trust teachers to know who has participated and who has not in classroom discussions. But, this app illustrates the Left’s claims that education is biased against minorities.

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