Nathan Sanders

Anyone here going to Interspeech and wants to do a student a big favor? He was accepted & paid, but ultimately cannot leave the U.S. due to ongoing fascism (he’s on a visa). They will pull his paper if he can’t find anyone to present it for him. DM if you’re attending & may be able to help!

We were initially interested in looking for possible linguistic bias against non-native English speakers, but instead, we stumbled upon a possible tool to help close the gender gap in math and other STEM fields.

We find the well-documented gender gap, with male students performing slightly higher on numerical questions than female students. However, with writing questions, the gap goes away!

Students tend to do worse on these kinds of writing questions in comparison to more traditional numerical questions, but the score difference between question types is consistent for all students, regardless of linguistic background, living situation, international status, … but not gender!

New article by Lex Konnelly, Jason Siefken, Pocholo Umbal, and me: "Are writing questions in math fair?" scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/ind...

Main take-aways:

Yes, math questions that require written explanatory prose seem to be fair, with the right questions, rubrics, and grader training.

Came here to say exactly the same!

That's wonderful! Congrats!!!

Welcome to Bluesky, UofT Linguistics! @uoftlinguistics.bsky.social

#linguistics

Check out the new thematic issue of RCL/CJL on teaching and learning in linguistics, edited by Catherine @candershamilton.bsky.social, Nathan @ludling.bsky.social and me!

Introducing the {messy} package | Nicola Rennie The {messy} R package takes a clean dataset, and randomly adds mess to create data more similar to that which you'd find in the real world. This is an easy way for educators to create data sets that g...

🎉 The {messy} package is now available on CRAN! 🎉

Read the introductory blog post here: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu...

#RStats #StatsEd #DataScience

This is super cool!

Deaf people don't have broken English. @linasigns.bsky.social and I will present this next week at SIGN10. A little sneak preview here:

This looks amazing!

Linguist here! 👋

Ok I will admit that I was VERY hesitant to get on a new social media platform. I already have like 6 and honestly the internet isn't that fun these days, but I have to admit I'm really enjoying Bluesky!

Please consider sharing this post to help me grow my Bluesky audience to match the rest!

Large letters made of red flowers saying NOEL, standing among trees with yellow string lights covering their trunks

Rows of trees with large lighted red balls in their branches, with various other lighted elements in the background

X-shaped wooden bridge lined with short poles topped with lighted white snowflake globes, with a curtain of lights in the background

Curtain of blue string lights, with various other lighted elements in the background

Tree with dense covering of white string lights on the trunk and branches, atop a podium that says Bloor Yorkville Holiday Magic

Squared tunnel of yellow string lights, with various other lighted elements in the background

Poles covered in green lights, spaced evenly among a grid of evergreen trees, projecting rays of green light on the ground

Conical Christmas tree covered in lights, , atop a podium that says Bloor Yorkville Holiday Magic

Yorkville holiday lights! #Toronto #Photography

As a kid, I loved Pepto Bismol so much that I would complain about having a stomach ache when I was actually perfectly fine!

I don’t know what to say today, but fortunately I gave some answers in this that I stand by.

glaad.org/nicole-maine...

Amazing!

Me me!

Hey! I'm teaching "Linguistics of Sign Languages" at the Linguistics Society of America's Summer Institute this summer (w/ Ryan Lepic). There are going to be so many great classes and instructors. I'd appreciate if you'd share this and send good students our way!

center.uoregon.edu/LSA/2025/pro...

Teaching in Linguistics Community of Practice (TiLCoP) Canada has joined Bluesky! Find us at: bsky.app/profile/tilc...

We've been a bit quiet on social media after taking a much needed rest from publishing the 2nd edition of Essentials of Linguistics essentialsoflinguistics.ca.

So, using more writing questions in STEM could help cut the gender gap, without disadvantaging students based on language ability.

Preprint available here:
sanders.phonologist.org/Papers/konne...

Result: Yes!

But a cool additional result we didn't anticipate: Writing questions are also fair for gender, essentially erasing the well-known gender gap in STEM (which was replicated in our non-writing questions).

Just got notice that our co-authored "Are writing questions in math fair?" is finally in the production pipeline for Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning!

Main research Q: Are writing questions ("explain…", etc.) in math fair for students across different linguistic backgrounds?

Better yet, \text{} from the amsmath package! It preserves spaces, accents, etc. It treats its argument as text, while \mathrm{} treats its argument as math, which is usually not what's intended, though it is good for differential operators, like $\mathrm{d}x$.

One of my favourites!!!

And yes to the emotional labour! I hope to be able to teach my students how and why AI will fail them, so they'll be more careful. That's one of the goals of our sample assignment! It highlights some reasons why AI can't be trusted to write their essays for them. If they still use it after that… 🤷‍♂️

Oh, duh, my bad! hahaha 🙃