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Investigating Gender Bias in the OpenStax Ebook, College Algebra 2e: An Addition to an Ongoing Conversation
Virtual
M.S. DefenseSpeaker: Kaitlynn Spiker
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate gender bias in the OpenStax online textbook, College Algebra 2e. First, I provide a literature review that details how textbooks have historically been gender-biased, and how this is particularly disheartening for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. I then summarize research that illustrates the importance of representation in STEM fields. To study whether bias was present in the College Algebra textbook, I created a database of all the applied problems in the textbook and coded them based on different criteria. Next, I aggregated the data into summary tables for each category and created proportions for each of the categories. Finally, I used confidence intervals and Fisher’s Exact Test to compare the different proportions. I did not find evidence of gender bias in the problems, but I did find a lack of representation in the historical figures mentioned in the textbook. This shows improvements from… Read more.