ERIC Number: ED675601
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 9
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
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Available Date: 0000-00-00
A Bias-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Hierarchical Microcredential Classification
Mohammad Arif Ul Alam; Geeta Verma; Eumie Jhong; Justin Barber; Ashis Kumer Biswas
International Educational Data Mining Society, Paper presented at the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (18th, Palermo, Italy, Jul 20-23, 2025)
The growing demand for microcredentials in education and workforce development necessitates scalable, accurate, and fair assessment systems for both soft and hard skills based on students' lived experience narratives. Existing approaches struggle with the complexities of hierarchical credentialing and the mitigation of algorithmic bias related to gender and ethnicity. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework that integrates hierarchical classification based on dynamic thresholding with a dual deep Q network dueling (DDQN dueling) for bias mitigation. Our method improves predictive performance at all three levels of microcredential classification, achieving an increase in 7% sensitivity and an improvement in 6% specificity over baseline models. Furthermore, our framework significantly improves fairness by reducing gender and ethnicity bias, as measured by equalized odds, by over 20% compared to conventional approaches. Extensive evaluations on a dataset of 3,000 student narratives demonstrate a 12% improvement in the F1 score and a 5% increase in AUROC relative to existing methods. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach in advancing both hierarchical classification accuracy and fairness in real-world educational applications. [For the complete proceedings, see ED675583.]
Descriptors: Microcredentials, Sex, Ethnicity, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Bias, Algorithms, Student Experience, Material Development, Automation
International Educational Data Mining Society. e-mail: admin@educationaldatamining.org; Web site: https://educationaldatamining.org/conferences/
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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Author Affiliations: N/A

Peer reviewed
