A Sociological Lens on Linguistic Diversity: Implications for Writing Inclusive Multiple-Choice Assessments
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in large introductory courses. Recent research focuses on MCQ reliability and validity and overlooks questions of accessibility. Yet, access to the norms of academic discourse embedded in MCQs differs between groups of first-year students. We theorize these norms as part of the institutionalized cultural symbols that reproduce social and cultural exclusion for linguistically diverse students. A sociological focus on linguistic diversity is necessary as the percentage of students who use English as an additional language (EAL), rather than English as a native language (ENL), has grown. Drawing on sociology as pedagogy, we problematize MCQs as a medium shaping linguistically diverse students’ ability to demonstrate disciplinary knowledge. Our multimethod research uses two-stage randomized exams and focus groups with EAL and ENL students to assess the effects of a modification in instructors’ MCQ writing practices in sociology and psychology courses. Findings show that students are more likely to answer a modified MCQ correctly, with greater improvement for EAL students.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it