Black/African-American Learners in North America

Kai et al. (2017) pdf

• Models predicting student retention in an online college program
• J48 decision trees achieved much lower Kappa and AUC for Black students than White students
• JRip decision rules achieved almost identical Kappa and AUC for Black students and White students

Hu and Rangwala (2020) pdf

• Models predicting if a college student will fail in a course
• Multiple cooperative classifier model (MCCM) model was the best at reducing bias, or discrimination against African-American students, while other models (particularly Logistic Regression and Rawlsian Fairness) performed far worse
• The level of bias was inconsistent across courses, with MCCM prediction showing the least bias for Psychology and the greatest bias for Computer Science

Lee and Kizilcec (2020) [pdf]

• Models predicting college success (or median grade or above)
• Random forest algorithms performed significantly worse for underrepresented minority students (URM; American Indian, Black, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Multicultural) than non-URM students (White and Asian)
• The fairness of the model, namely demographic parity and equality of opportunity, as well as its accuracy, improved after correcting the threshold values

Yu et al. (2020) [pdf]

• Model predicting undergraduate short-term (course grades) and long-term (average GPA) success
• Black students were inaccurately predicted to perform worse for both short-term and long-term
• The fairness of models improved when either click or a combination of click and survey data, and not institutional data, was included in the model

Yu and colleagues (2021) [pdf]

• Models predicting college dropout for students in residential and fully online program
• Whether the protected attributed were included or not, the models had worse true negative rates and recall for underrepresented minority (URM) students, in residential and online programs.
• The model was less accurate for URM students studying in residential program.

Ramineni & Williamson (2018) [pdf]

• Revised automated scoring engine for assessing GSE essay
• Relative weakness in content and organization by African American test takers resulted in lower scores than Chinese peers who wrote longer.