Learning technology’s power to adapt to varying prior preparation levels and learning needs is well established, but only recently has courseware been designed explicitly to promote more equitable experiences and outcomes. This session will describe equity-promoting courseware features and present evidence on how Black, Latine, and low-income students experience them.

The Gates Foundation is making a major investment in courseware designed to meet the needs of college students who historically have had lower rates of success in key gateway courses—specifically, Black, Latine, and Indigenous students and all students impacted by poverty. At Digital Promise, we are investigating how faculty implement the first examples of equity-focused courseware and the impact of that courseware on the course experiences, learning, and academic attainment of the focal student groups. This session will draw on data from the first three semesters of Digital Promise’s research on teaching and learning in gateway courses in 25 colleges, contrasting instructor practices and student affect and engagement in classes using courseware designed to promote equity with those in business-as-usual classes without the courseware. Survey data will document students’ high level of subject matter anxiety and misgivings about course difficulty, especially among historically and systemically excluded student groups (those from low-income households, working students, African American students, first-generation college goers, and females). Specific courseware design features intended to promote equity, engagement, and learning for Black, Latine, Indigenous and low-income students will be described for two new courseware products—Introduction to Statistics from Lumen Learning and REAL CHEM, created by a consortium of ASU and Carnegie Mellon University. Presenters will distinguish between equity-promoting features built into the courseware in such a way that any student using the courseware will experience the feature and courseware affordances and embedded resources that depend on changes in instructor practice in order to have the intended impact on students. Data gathered from student interviews and from surveys of over 1,500 students will shed light on those equity-focused features that students themselves consider most and least helpful. Analyses of student survey data will reveal relationships between specific instructor practices and students’ sense of belonging, course enjoyment, expected value, and confidence. Finally, we will present a framework for more equitable instruction through use of equity-centered courseware within a flipped classroom model with the instructor (1) leveraging courseware-collected data to select the focus for classroom activities and (2) devoting more time to collaborative active learning. Interactive aspects of the session will include an empathy-building exercise, prediction of research findings prior to seeing actual data, and a discussion of implications of the presented data for faculty professional development.