Equity in learning is a core goal of all teaching institutions (OECD, 2018). For universities, most assessments of inequalities in student performance are undertaken ex post, once the examination results have been published, and so too late to impact upon the students’ achievements for that year. Measuring inequalities in student learning ex ante, while instruction is in progress, however, is difficult. In this blog post we will discuss how we can measure inequalities in student learning ex ante and present an example of how we may address such inequalities in learning with no prior knowledge of learning inequalities of the cohort.
Ideally, university teachers need to have a portrait of inequalities in student achievement of their current cohort before they start teaching. There are some difficulties presented with this objective. First, what do we mean by student equity? Do we mean that all students have equal opportunities to enable them to obtain higher grades; or do we simply mean that they develop greater learning abilities (Jencks, 1988)? Second, if we focus simply on learning outcomes (that is, measured via student performance), how do we measure inequalities in their potential performance before instruction takes place?
This difficulty also lies at the core of understanding how to measure inequality for other known measurable entities, such as income and wealth (Sen, 1980). The problem of not having data about inequalities in student learning at the onset of teaching is similar to that of a statistician having incomplete data or even no data. For the lecturer standing at the podium, the audience are just an unsorted sample of students, without any prior knowledge of their specific learning abilities.
