Technology: Ubiquitous Expectations & Fragmented Access
By Melinda Lanius, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Arizona
The third week of February 2021 was awful for so many across the United States. Temperatures reached dangerous lows, water pipes froze, and power grids failed. I hope you all were able to stay safe and warm and were able to connect to the resources you needed. Amongst all of the struggles with that winter storm and subsequent fallout, I kept seeing a valuable conversation on social media. I hope we can extend that discussion into warmer days. It started something like:
If my university calls a snow day, but I’m teaching online, is my class cancelled?
Some colleagues encouraged the educator to embrace the snow day. It's an unexpected free day! But then others wrote about their concerns of shuffling curriculum and about their students falling behind. Since we are all stuck at home online anyway, why take a day off? Then someone offered the insight I want to highlight:
Many students have to commute to campus to use the internet.
Illustration by Melinda Lanius
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and transition to emergency remote learning, students who had an unreliable computer or internet service began to struggle more than ever. In Spring and Summer 2020, my collaborators and I [2] used the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale [1] as one measure of the impact of remote learning on undergraduate mathematics students at the University of Arizona, a large state university where a bit over 30% of students are first-generation college students. Math anxiety is characterized as negative feelings that disrupt the ability to manipulate numbers or solve math problems. Alarmingly, this anxiety can cause a decline in academic performance, regardless of a student’s actual mathematical competence.
While a very small percentage of the respondents in our study reported having rare access to the internet (~2% of n=827), the effect on these students was large: on average, they moved from low to medium or from medium to high math anxiety. On the other hand, the general population on average was likely to have a slight increase in anxiety, but not enough to change their level designation (i.e. low, medium, high). Note that while 2% may seem small percentage-wise, in a pool of 7,000 undergraduate students, that means 140 students are at high risk of an increase in math anxiety. Further, American Indian or Alaska Native students were disproportionately represented in the group of those with rare access to internet.
Math anxiety can have a lasting impact on an undergraduate student’s future. High anxiety students tend to take fewer math classes, thus limiting their career options. Further down the line, the prevalence of math anxiety in undergraduate students will harm the national workforce in science and technology [3].
While online classes demand ubiquitous use of technology, the reality is access remains fragmented. As an instructor, it is easy to forget about these students. I have caught myself assuming that every student has reliable home internet and a computer. The philosophy I try to use is student-ready college [4]. “Student-ready college” flips the script on the familiar “college-ready student.” Instead of structuring my course to serve the ‘dream’ student with immaculate study skills who possesses ample free time to dedicate to my course, I try to fashion my course structure to serve any and all students as they are. Many students are balancing work and school. A student may start the semester strong, but then get very sick part-way through. Another may not have reliable internet.
Examples of student-ready course structure include posting a lecture recording and also posting pdf notes, because I know that videos can be hard to load with limited internet. A pdf, on the other hand, can be downloaded quickly at a wifi access point and taken home. I also have a Google voice phone number which I call the “linear algebra hotline,” complete with a cheery welcome message from yours truly. Students can call and leave a voice message for me if they are unable to use the internet.
I am recommitting myself to keeping technology requirements in mind when designing my courses. I hope you’ll join me in this commitment and share your ideas on how to expand equitable access to the online classroom.
[1] Hopko, D. R., Mahadevan, R., Bare, R. L., & Hunt, M. K. (2003). The abbreviated math anxiety scale (AMAS) construction, validity, and reliability. Assessment, 10(2), 178-182.
[2] Unmotivated, Depressed, Anxious: Impact of the COVID-19 Emergency Transition to Remote Learning on Undergraduates’ Math Anxiety. M. Lanius, A. Farrell, T. Jones, S. Kao, T. Lazarus, (2020) preprint, 10 pages.
[3] Andrews, A. & Brown, J. (2015). The effects of math anxiety. Education, 135(3), 362-370.
[4] McNair, T. B., Albertine, S., Cooper, M. A., McDonald, N., & Major Jr, T. (2016). Becoming a student-ready college: A new culture of leadership for student success. John Wiley & Sons.
[5] Lanius, M., Farrell, A., Frugé Jones, T., Kao, S., & Lazarus, T. (2021). Unmotivated, Depressed, Anxious: Impact of the COVID-19 Emergency Transition to Remote Learning on Undergraduates’ Math Anxiety. Accepted for publication at the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.