Socioeconomic Status

Yudelson et al. (2014) pdf

• Models discovering generalizable sub-populations of students across different schools to predict students' learning with Carnegie Learning’s Cognitive Tutor (CLCT)

• Models trained on schools with a high proportion of low-SES student performed worse than those trained with medium or low proportion
• Models trained on schools with low, medium proportion of SES students performed similarly well for schools with high proportions of low-SES students

Yu et al. (2020) pdf

• Models predicting undergraduate course grades and average GPA

• Students from low-income households were inaccurately predicted to perform worse for both short-term (final course grade) and long-term (GPA)
• Fairness of model improved if it included only clickstream and survey data

Yu et al. (2021) pdf

• Models predicting college dropout for students in residential and fully online program
• Whether the socio-demographic information was included or not, the model showed worse accuracy and true negative rates for residential students with greater financial needs
• The model showed better recall for students with greater financial needs, especially for those studying in person

Kung & Yu (2020) pdf

• Predicting course grades and later GPA at public U.S. university
• Equal performance for low-income and upper-income students in course grade prediction for several algorithms and metrics
• Worse performance on independence for low-income students than high-income students in later GPA prediction for four of five algorithms; one algorithm had worse separation and two algorithms had worse sufficiency

Litman et al. (2021) html

• Automated essay scoring models inferring text evidence usage
• All algorithms studied have less than 1% of error explained by whether student receives free/reduced price lunch

Queiroga et al. (2022) pdf

• Models predicting secondary school students at risk of failure or dropping out
• Model was unable to make prediction of student success (F1 score = 0.0) for students not in a social welfare program (higher socioeconomic status)
• Model had slightly lower AUC ROC (0.52 instead of 0.56) for students not in a social welfare program (higher socioeconomic status)

Permodo et al. (2023) pdf

• Paper discusses system that predicts probabilities of on-time graduation
• Prediction is more accurate for low-income students than non-low-income students

Cock et al.(2023) [pdf]

• Paper investigates biases in models designed to early identify middle school students at risk of failing in flipped-classroom course and open-ended exploration environment (TugLet)
• Model performs worse for students from school with higher socio-economic status in open-ended environment (FNR=0.73 for higher SES and FNR=0.57 for medium SES).