Skip to content

Equity Audit Checklist

Run the Equity Audit Checklist MicroSim fullscreen

About This MicroSim

Ten items across five categories, scored against the club's actual practices rather than its intentions. It takes about ten minutes and it is meant to be run for real, not read.

The callout is the design decision that matters. It always names exactly one category and one item. Never "keep improving", never an overall club rating. A single overall score tells a leader they are doing fine or not doing fine, and neither of those is an action. "Ask one mentor to run next week's opening demo" is something somebody can do on Tuesday.

Ties go to the earlier category on purpose. The order runs roughly by how much a fix compounds: what students see in the material, then who they see teaching, then who is in the room at all. A club with three categories at zero should start with the curriculum, because it is the cheapest to change and every student sees it.

Two items are worth reading slowly.

"Leads visible, front-of-room demonstrations, not only support tasks." A mentor team can be diverse on paper and still have the same person doing every demo. Who is at the front is what students read as "people like me do this", and that is a rota decision, not a recruiting one.

"Has been asked directly what accommodation would help them, in the last term." Not "we would accommodate anyone who asked". Waiting to be asked puts the work on the family, and most families do not ask.

Scoring honestly is the whole point. Partial is a real answer and most items start there.

How to Use

  • Click a category to open it; only one is open at a time so the list stays readable.
  • Click any item to cycle Absent → Partial → Present. Score the club you have, not the one you mean to have.
  • Watch the Do this first callout change as you go. It always names one category and one item.
  • Reset audit clears everything back to absent so you can run it again next term and compare.

Lesson Plan

Bloom level: Evaluate (L5) -- assess

Learning objective: Given the club's own current practices, the learner scores each of five equity-audit categories on a simple present/partial/absent scale and identifies the lowest-scoring category as the next priority.

Before the audit (5 min). Agree that partial is a normal answer. An audit where everything comes out Present has not been run honestly, and one where everything comes out Absent usually means somebody is being hard on a club that is three weeks old.

Running it (15 min). Do it with two or three people, not one. The disagreements are the useful part — one person's Present is another's Partial, and working out which is right requires naming actual evidence.

After (the term). Do the one action the callout named. Then run it again next term and see whether that category moved.

Check for understanding. Ask: "Your audit comes out at 70 percent overall with one category at zero. Is the club doing well?" No — the average is hiding a category with nothing in it, which is exactly why this tool never shows an overall score.

Embedding This MicroSim

Paste this into any page of the book, adjusting the relative path to docs/sims/ for the page's depth:

<iframe src="../../sims/equity-audit-checklist/main.html" width="100%" height="622" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Specification

The full specification below is extracted from Chapter 29: Building Trust and Representation in Your Club.

Type: microsim
**sim-id:** equity-audit-checklist<br/>
**Library:** p5.js<br/>
**Status:** Specified

Purpose: Give a club leader a genuinely usable, run-it-today checklist that scores the club's current practices across the five areas covered in this chapter and names the single lowest-scoring area to fix first.

Bloom Taxonomy: Evaluate (L5)
Bloom Taxonomy Verb: assess

Learning objective: Given the club's own current practices, the learner scores each of five equity-audit categories on a simple present/partial/absent scale and identifies the lowest-scoring category as the next priority.

Canvas layout:
- Top (60px): Title bar and "Reset Audit" button
- Left (65%): Five category panels, each expandable, each containing 2-3 checklist items
- Right (35%): Running score by category (bar per category, 0-100%) and a "Lowest Scoring Category" callout box

Categories and checklist items (each item is a 3-state toggle: Absent = 0, Partial = 1, Present = 2):

1. Curriculum Representation
   - "Named pioneers in our material include more than one gender and one race."
   - "Sample project photos and themes reflect more than one cultural background."

2. Mentor Team
   - "At least one mentor from an underrepresented group leads visible, front-of-room demonstrations, not only support tasks."
   - "Our mentor recruiting reaches beyond one existing personal network."

3. Community Partnership
   - "We have an active partnership with at least one faith-based, rural-hub, urban-neighborhood, or immigrant-serving organization."
   - "That partnership involved us showing up and listening before we asked for anything."

4. Accessibility
   - "We have at least one assistive technology option on hand (switch access, text-to-speech, magnification, captions)."
   - "A student or family has been asked directly what accommodation would help them, in the last term."

5. Marketing Materials
   - "Our flyers and sign-up materials show diverse, non-stereotyped imagery."
   - "Our promotional language has been checked by someone outside the existing mentor team."

Interactive controls:
- Click any checklist item to cycle it through Absent / Partial / Present
- Category panels expand/collapse on click
- "Reset Audit" button clears all items back to Absent
- Automatic "Lowest Scoring Category" callout updates live as items change, naming the category and suggesting the single lowest-scoring item within it as the next concrete action

Behavior: each category's bar fills proportionally to its items' total score out of the category maximum, color-coded red (0-33%), yellow (34-66%), green (67-100%); the callout box always names exactly one category and one item, never a generic "keep improving" message, so the leader leaves with one concrete next step rather than a vague score.

Instructional rationale: This matches the Evaluate-level checklist pattern because the chapter's own closing outcome asks the reader to run an equity audit and identify one concrete next action; a scored, item-level checklist -- rather than a single overall club rating -- produces exactly that one prioritized action instead of an abstract sense of "doing fine" or "needs work."

Implementation: p5.js for the panel layout, toggle states, and color-coded bars; the fifteen checklist items and category structure are stored in a small JavaScript data array, since the fixed item set doesn't need an external data.json file.

References