United States

Informal physics programs create spaces through various formats to bring together physicists, physics students and public audiences. The facilitators, volunteers, and audience members each bring their own knowledge, experiences, and interests to these spaces which, in addition to availability of resources, influences the physics content and activities that these programs employ. As one part of our greater qualitative research study, we analyze interview data from lead facilitators of multiple informal physics programs with different formats to better understand the key organizational factors important to the design and implementation of meaningful informal physics activities. In this poster, we discuss common aspects from personnel, audiences, and available resources that impact informal physics content and activities, and consider the implications of COVID.

PERC SM 21

Understanding Influencing Factors of Informal Physics Content and Activities

informal physics

public engagement

outreach

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


AAPT SM 20

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

poster

**Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics**

As a gateway discipline to STEM majors and careers, physics plays a central role in deciding who does, and who doesn't, get to discover and pursue scientific careers. Technical and scientific professionals are rewarded with economic privilege and status which affords them both social and cultural power. Therefore, social justice will be realized only when the opportunity, and the choice, to excel in physics is open to all students. The culture and practices of the physics classroom reflect the culture of physics at large, which raises the question of how our professional physics communities can embrace, rather than inadvertently repel, a diverse group of academics that can help improve physics culture.  To this end, the 2021 Physics Education Research Conference will focus on defining inclusive spaces and practices. Additionally, we will explore strategies for eliminating exclusionary practices in our classrooms, research spaces, and professional organizations. We call on the community to propose sessions that will drive conversations related to these initiatives throughout PERC 2021.

Please download the full program [here. ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRMC_SYJ3PUqXyP7sskA7LRSA8ow0eRE/view?usp=sharing)

August 4, 2021 - August 5, 2021 in a Virtual Conference Format

Making Physics More Inclusive and Eliminating Exclusionary Practices in Physics

Much existing physics education research (PER) on student ideas about momentum focuses on the difficulties that students face when learning this topic. These difficulties are framed as obstacles for students to overcome in order to develop correct understandings of physics. Our research takes a resources-oriented approach to analyzing student responses to momentum questions, viewing student ideas as valuable and potentially productive for learning, over and above their correctness. Here, we highlight four conceptual resources that provide insight into students’ ideas about momentum, which are the conservation resource, direction resource, collisions resource and properties resource These resources are context-dependent and could be elicited and built on by instructors to support students in developing more complex and sophisticated understandings of physics.

Identifying student resources for understanding linear momentum

The research in E&M has commonly focused on problem-solving abilities and the use of physical principles for such matters. Several studies have found that some concepts represent a challenge for undergraduate students, such as Gauss's and Ampere's laws. The inability to identify and analyze the symmetry of field and field source distributions and focus on the surface features of these E&M systems are two of the main difficulties associated with these laws so far. We present this study to contribute with a different perspective of observing 322 introductory E&M students' understanding of these laws with unconventional shapes for the field sources' enclosing objects. We use a phenomenographic approach to detect difficulties and compare the difficulties between the two contexts and those previously reported. Our main findings suggest that some students make an incomplete or incorrect analysis of the situation when they refer to surface features of the situation and that the confusions between flux and field in the electric context, or between circulation and field in the magnetic context, persist. Finally, we present suggestions for teachers to approach these difficulties.

Comparing students' understanding of Gauss's and Ampere's laws with field sources in square-like symmetries

Collaborative group work is an important aspect of many introductory physics labs. This research focuses on how the gender diversity of a group of students impacts their engagement in the collaborative portion of an online introductory physics lab. We conducted a mixed methods study to determine the relationship between the gender composition of groups and the degree of engagement those groups demonstrated in weekly collaborative activity reflections, using randomly-assigned groups of four students. We also investigated the impact of giving students explicit grading rubrics. We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with students in order to understand their perspective and experiences collaborating with others. When students were not provided with grading rubrics, we found that groups of all men had highest levels of engagement, and groups with only one woman had lowest levels of engagement as evidenced by the length of written reflections. On the other hand, when students were provided with explicit grading rubrics, groups with one or more women had higher, comparable, levels of engagement. In interviews, women described interactions in majority-male groups that were detrimental to effective collaboration, such as being ignored or talked over. These results suggest that instructors could improve equity in online lab courses (and perhaps other classes as well) by assembling student groups that do not have a single, isolated, woman group member or providing clear grading expectations.

Challenges of building an inclusive community of learners in the physics lab

Students as Partners (SaP) is an approach where students and faculty work in partnership on the co-design of a curricular or institutional change effort. Our team implements SaP through Departmental Action Teams (DATs), which are facilitated teams of faculty, students, and staff within a single STEM department working on some issue related to undergraduate education. In our research, we aim to understand the ways in which SaP becomes enacted in DATs. Through analyzing interviews with student and faculty members of a single DAT, we construct a case study of the complexities and challenges of student-faculty partnership. We find that members of a partnership can hold different views of that partnership. Underlying these differences are differing views about their joint work as well as differences in how visible power dynamics are. In self-critically analyzing the ways in which we mitigated and reproduced power dynamics, we then reflect on our project’s areas for growth.

Unpacking Challenges in Student-Faculty Partnerships on Departmental Action Teams

Change efforts in higher education are increasingly focused at the department-level, allowing for the benefits of a grassroots approach while also incorporating top-down implementation. Two models for departmentally-based change are active at the University of Colorado Boulder: the Departmental Action Team (DAT) Project and Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) Initiative. In both models, externally-facilitated teams meet regularly to work on projects relevant to their departments, however the focus of teams’ work differs, as do the models’ underlying frameworks and principles. To better understand how these models of institutional change operate and their implications for change work in higher education, we interviewed individuals from both efforts, including team facilitators, principal investigators, and those involved in the development of the models. Our results indicate that differences between the models (such as facilitation styles, team meeting processes, and team-level and initiative-level goals) have connections to the frameworks underlying each, and they have implications for participants’ experiences and teams’ outcomes. We present notable differences and similarities in the change process in the two models, the potential impact of these similarities and differences, and implications for others doing change work.

Fostering departmental change through collaborative work: an analysis of two approaches and their implications

As the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS) continues to advance, there is an increased need for a quantum-smart workforce to address the needs of the growing quantum industry. As institutions begin to expand their course offerings, there is a unique opportunity for discipline-based education researchers to have an impact on the curricular and pedagogical choices being made in these courses. As a first step, it is necessary for education researchers to have a representative picture of what QIS education currently looks like.

We reviewed recent course catalogues from a large sample of institutions in the United States looking for courses focused on QIS content. Our conservative analysis reveals that roughly a quarter of the institutions we reviewed offer QIS courses. While encouraging for such an emerging field, we found disparities in the types of institutions offering these courses as the vast majority were Doctoral-granting institutions. Additionally, we found that some classifications of minority serving institutions were much less likely to offer a QIS course (for example Historically Black Colleges and Universities or Predominantly Black Institutions), while Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions were more likely than the national average to offer a QIS course. These disparities may lead to further racial, socioeconomic, and geographic disparity in the future quantum workforce. We also found that there was no single department that offered a majority of the QIS courses, indicating that the best efforts to improve QIS education will need to consider the multi-disciplinary nature of the field of quantum information science.

An Overview of Quantum Information Science Courses at US Institutions

Earning a bachelor's degree is expensive and time-consuming. Many undergraduate students pursue Advanced Placement (AP) courses in high school or transfer coursework from degree-granting institutions. However, the effect of those transfer credits on the time that it takes students to graduate (time-to-degree) is currently not well understood. We have investigated how incoming transfer credit impacts students' time-to-degree by defining three independent groups of transfer students: (1) those entering with College-level transfer credit, (2) those with only AP-level transfer credit, and (3) those without any transfer credit. The time-to-degree has been shown to be statistically different for each of these groups, with students who enter with college-level transfer credit graduating with the fewest semesters. We have explored differences in time-to-degree for students majoring in Physics and particularly for those who are traditionally underrepresented in the field. Cohen's d results suggest large negative effects on the time-to-degree for Physics students without any transfer credit, especially for female students and underrepresented ethnic or racial minority students. These results provide implications toward how universities advertise graduation in four years, as well as other impacts toward student financial aid such as four-year scholarships.

Analyzing time-to-degree for transfer students at a Large Midwestern University

This study informs the Physics Education Research (PER) community about patterns in reported funding and authorship data between 2010 and 2019. The study involves a text-based analysis of all contributed PERC and Physical Review PER papers during this time to identify funding sources, author collaborations, and changes over time. PERC and PRPER are both central to publication in the PER community, but are different in terms of project stage and publication prestige. Physical Review articles are in general mature projects, and this is the more prestigious publication venue. PERC proceedings represent the community across a broader set of authors and project stages. Results are also contrasted with the Frontiers in Education proceedings to provide context to these findings. The goal of this work is to provide insight into the community's history and to provide a benchmark for funding and collaboration in PER prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Contrasting funding and author data for PERC proceedings and PRPER

DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager.

Community Roles for Supporting Emerging Education Researchers

The growing push to address the lack of diversity in physics has come with an array of curriculum reforms and interventions. There has been work in Physics Education Research (PER) that has supported these reforms, including studying the experiences and identity development of students from minoritized backgrounds. However, there has been a lack of critical reflection on the core methodologies and constructs used in PER. Here, we present a critical analysis of qualitative and quantitative work used to define and measure “expert-like” thinking, beliefs, and practices in physics. We show that this work has largely omitted any consideration of race or cultural backgrounds of participants, instead defining “experts” as either physics faculty or Ph.D. holders. Research in critical theory demonstrates that failing to intentionally address potential biases tends towards reinforcing those biases. Thus, work in PER on expert-like thinking may unintentionally replicate, rather than challenge, existing biased structures in physics. We conclude with recommendations for constructing more inclusive views of what it means for students to develop “expert-like” thinking.

Premium content

Understanding Influencing Factors of Informal Physics Content and Activities

Next from PERC SM 21

Identifying student resources for understanding linear momentum

Similar lecture

STEM Student Integration and Identity through Discipline-based Outreach Activities