Week 7 Discussion

“While MOOCs, high-quality educational materials developed by elite universities, are used to reinforce the advantage of privileged adults, the opposite appeared to be true for socio-economically disadvantaged youth, who might be spending significant amounts of time on leisure- oriented websites like coolmath-games that have little evidence for the potential in advancing their social and human capital.” (Zhang, 11)

At some point, I’d love to have a discussion about biases that come up in the context of academic writing and/or experiment construction. The sentence above is is a deprivation stand model of thinking: the socio-economically disadvantaged youth are broken and need to advance, but they’re only interested in leisure activities. Intervention is needed, and quickly. How do we avoid that kind of language and framing? Are there resources for researchers before they get to the peer-review processes?