English Department Senior Lecturer Lezlie Christensen-Branum has been honored with the TEAL Dissertation of the Year Award for Myside Bias Shifting in the Written Arguments of First-Year Composition Students, which was a semester-long, qualitative multiple case study of seven students negotiating their biases as they navigated a curriculum designed to mitigate them. Myside bias is a feature of written arguments in which people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased towards their own opinions.
Described as a “sin against reasonableness,” myside bias obscures open-minded and critical thinking and is therefore antithetical to the objectives of many writing tasks. Perhaps more importantly: myside bias has important implications beyond academic contexts. Whether young adults are seeking entertainment or information, they face the task of evaluating claims more frequently than any former generation, and they do so within what many technology researchers and ethicists have recently testified before the U.S. House and Senate has become an “economy of misinformation” fueled by social media platform use of A.I. algorithms designed to maintain user attention for profit. For both educational and civic reasons, an understanding of myside bias can assist teachers in adopting strategies to help students not only recognize their own biases, but to better understand how biases are enacted in discourses that involve multiple perspectives and the contexts that shape those perspectives.
The study found that how college student writers interpret argument-writing contexts—their own writerly identities, rhetorical situations, argument-writing tasks, assignment descriptions, others’ expectations, argument conventions, sources, and perceived audiences—dramatically affects how they negotiate their myside bias. These interpretations were found to be strongly related to individuals’ identities and backgrounds.
These implications include: How “argument” is framed and discussed—the words used to teach and learn it—matter. Continued reference to argument as a solely “persuasive” enterprise sets students (and teachers) up for failure. The social component of myside bias suggests that it is fundamentally an ourside bias, one that also thrives among educators and administrators, which should be collectively addressed. Finally, the study discusses how myside bias threatens democratic nations; this threat is amplified when, as is the case of the U.S., the nation is comprised of diverse people, value systems, ideologies, and circumstances. The study suggests methods for the balanced integration of multiple perspectives in inquiry-based argumentation.
On the experience and process, Lezlie reflects, “Results from the dissertation improved the way I teach argument and the way my students learn it. Since it was published in August 2022, it’s been downloaded 212 times across 31 countries—so my sincerest wish is that it helps others benefit in similar ways.”