Grant recipient: Sara Humphreys, St. Jerome's University
(Project timeline: September 2016 - August 2017)
Description
This project started as an investigation into how online collaborative applications, such as Google Docs, might be used to create an equitable “playing field” in gender imbalanced STEM classrooms. Could these applications offer marginalized students, particularly female multilingual speakers an opportunity to have a voice? We were equally interested in the type of language used to comment on peer work online. Our results challenged our initial questions in a number of ways.
Questions Investigated
- How often do female and male students comment online?
- What language do they use? Do the grammatical constructions and vocabulary indicate dominance and control or inclusivity?
- Was the language stereotypically gendered (e.g. passive or active sentence constructions attributable by gender)
These questions, we hope, might shed light on how to conduct and guide online peer review to create a more equitable classroom.
Findings/Insights
Our findings challenged our own thinking about gender roles in some cases and in others, students conformed to stereotype. That is, female identified students did tend to use more empathetic, community oriented language while male students tended toward individualistic, authoritative declarations. However, we also discovered a number of the female students also used this kind of “power-driven” language. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (a form of linguistic analysis that gives analysts the tools to study language as a social practice in social structures), we discovered that students were not necessarily conforming to gender roles, but instead conforming to their assumptions of how a teacher might comment on student work. They were taking on the teacher’s “voice-of-authority” rather than a more collegial form of language use. That is, students often used the imperative voice. They did not use the language of texting or rarely used emoticons to soften the impact of the imperative. The imperative voice is often used to comment on student papers, and this is the discourse students seem to be using, despite the peer review guidelines to be polite and inclusive (students were provided with examples). Some students followed these guidelines, but many did not.
Further, is the gender imbalance so pronounced that female presence is muted even online? Our findings suggest that the lack of female students in the math faculty is a crisis and not simply a problem. Can peer review help to solve the gender imbalance? The answer is yes but with a qualification: female students are not silent online as they tend to be in the physical classroom; however, the extreme gender imbalance means that even online, they are still marginalized to the point of silence. An equally important finding is that teachers influence student interactions in surprising ways. The way in which instructors comment and interact with students seems to influence how students interact with each other. More study is needed, but this project offered, we believe, some surprising insights.
Dissemination and Impact
At the provincial, national and/or international levels (e.g., presenting at conferences beyond uWaterloo; impact on discipline): We presented our findings at the annual conference of the Society of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. I will also be writing a journal article for submission next summer about the link between feedback and peer review, as per our findings.
Impact of the Project
- Teaching: I am commenting differently on student papers. It’s clear that using the imperative voice sets up a dominating/dominated relationship with students. They tend to replicate this discourse in their peer review. Not all students do this, but enough do to warrant concern.
References
Project Reference List (PDF)