SocioEconomicMag Meets a Platform for SES-Diverse College Students: A Case Study

TL;DR

This study introduces SESMag, a method for evaluating and improving socio-economic inclusivity in educational technology, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying and reducing SES-related usability bugs for diverse college students.

Contribution

The paper presents SESMag, a novel multi-phase case study approach for assessing and enhancing SES-inclusivity in learning platforms, with demonstrated bug reduction.

Findings

SESMag identified SES-inclusivity bugs in 76% of features evaluated

The process helped fix bugs affecting low-SES students

User study showed 45-54% bug reduction, up to 80% for some bugs

Abstract

Emerging research shows that individual differences in how people use technology sometimes cluster by socioeconomic status (SES) and that when technology is not socioeconomically inclusive, low-SES individuals may abandon it. To understand how to improve technology's SES-inclusivity, we present a multi-phase case study on SocioEconomicMag (SESMag), an emerging inspection method for socio+economic inclusivity. In our 16-month case study, a software team developing a learning management platform used SESMag to evaluate and then to improve their platform's SES-inclusivity. The results showed that (1) the practitioners identified SES-inclusivity bugs in 76% of the features they evaluated; (2) these inclusivity bugs actually arise among low-SES college students; and (3) the SESMag process pointed ways towards fixing these bugs. Finally, (4) a user study with SES-diverse college students showed that the platform's SES-inclusivity eradicated 45-54% of the bugs; for some types of bugs, the bug instance eradication rate was 80% or higher.