Is a Seat at the Table Enough? Engaging Teachers and Students in Dataset
  Specification for ML in Education
Mei Tan Hansol Lee Dakuo Wang Hariharan Subramonyam
Despite the promises of ML in education, its adoption in the classroom has
surfaced numerous issues regarding fairness, accountability, and transparency,
as well as concerns about data privacy and student consent. A root cause of
these issues is the lack of understanding of the complex dynamics of education,
including teacher-student interactions, collaborative learning, and classroom
environment. To overcome these challenges and fully utilize the potential of ML
in education, software practitioners need to work closely with educators and
students to fully understand the context of the data (the backbone of ML
applications) and collaboratively define the ML data specifications. To gain a
deeper understanding of such a collaborative process, we conduct ten co-design
sessions with ML software practitioners, educators, and students. In the
sessions, teachers and students work with ML engineers, UX designers, and legal
practitioners to define dataset characteristics for a given ML application. We
find that stakeholders contextualize data based on their domain and procedural
knowledge, proactively design data requirements to mitigate downstream harms
and data reliability concerns, and exhibit role-based collaborative strategies
and contribution patterns. Further, we find that beyond a seat at the table,
meaningful stakeholder participation in ML requires structured supports:
defined processes for continuous iteration and co-evaluation, shared contextual
data quality standards, and information scaffolds for both technical and
non-technical stakeholders to traverse expertise boundaries.