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Record W4409223019 · doi:10.14434/josotl.v25i1.36135

Are writing questions in math fair?

2025· article· en· W4409223019 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMathematics Education and Teaching Techniques
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsMathematics educationMathematicsPsychologyPedagogy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this paper we examine whether a student’s language background and other demographic factors have any relationship to their performance on prose questions in math, which we define as questions with open-ended answers containing one or more complete sentences of English. Prose questions stand in contrast to non-prose questions, which are more traditional questions in math courses, requiring an objective answer, such as a number, an equation, a diagram, etc. Performing an exploratory analysis on n=463 students in a first-year linear algebra course, we use a step-down regression to identify significant factors contributing to a student’s non-prose tilt (how much better a student performs on non-prose vs. prose questions). We find gender is the only significant factor contributing to a student’s non-prose tilt . In particular, no linguistic factors we considered, including whether or not a student was a native English speaker, emerged as significant.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.012
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.143
Threshold uncertainty score0.995

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0120.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.383
Teacher spread0.351 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it