Abstract
In this paper a novel metric for evaluating inclusive excellence in teaching is introduced and applied to students' performance in classes before and during the COVID-19 era. The novel metric, named the Inclusive Excellence Ratio (IER), is designed to simultaneously reflect the two desirable characteristics embraced by inclusive excellence teaching: strong student performance and low variation in performance across all students. The computation of the IER given student test score data is simple and straightforward: it is the statistical sample mean divided by the sample standard deviation. Consequently, the IER is high when the students' test scores are high and variance is low, suggesting it may provide a useful quantitative measure for those educational innovators seeking to experiment with new, effective teaching methodologies that boost inclusive excellence. The IER is applied to evaluate a posteriori student performance taken from cumulative aggregate data from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) undergraduate math finance classes involving 378 students over two academic years (2018 to 2020), spanning five quarters before and one quarter during the COVID-19 era of remote teaching at UCI. Conclusions are drawn and discussed comparing the quality of in-person teaching environments to remote teaching environments.
Highlights
My arrival as a teacher at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2018 was accompanied by the opening of the Anteater Learning Pavilion, the first facility in California designed with active learning principles in mind with 55,000 square feet of learning space optimized for meaningful student engagement and productive collaboration
The novel metric, named the Inclusive Excellence Ratio (IER), is designed to simultaneously reflect the two desirable characteristics embraced by inclusive excellence teaching: strong student performance and low variation in performance across all students
The computation of the IER given student test score data is simple and straightforward: it is the statistical sample mean divided by the sample standard deviation
Summary
My arrival as a teacher at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2018 was accompanied by the opening of the Anteater Learning Pavilion, the first facility in California designed with active learning principles in mind with 55,000 square feet of learning space optimized for meaningful student engagement and productive collaboration. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States of America in 2020 and social distancing swept in as essential, UCI closed its doors to in-person teaching at the very end of the winter quarter in 2020, as did many other institutions based on guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention at that time (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Pandemonium instantaneously set in as professors were urged to transition from in-person to remote teaching almost overnight. UCI pivoted to a remote learning environment almost exclusively across the campus in Irvine, California
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