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There is a good deal of focus on recruiting underrepresented students to study physics at the collegiate level, but a lack of focus on how to make sure they are being recruited into a welcoming and safe environment that values their identity. Because of this, underrepresented students tend to feel a disconnect from the physics community and are more likely to drop out or switch majors. One potential method of combating this issue is increasing the peer networks of these students through informal outreach programs, which give students a sense of purpose, belonging, and confidence in physics. This systematic literature review synthesizes studies on the effects of informal STEM programs on the facilitators and identifies gaps in this research as it pertains to underrepresented students.&amp;nbsp;

AAPT WM 21

Retaining Underrepresented Students through Outreach Programs: A Systematic Literature Review

physics identity

informal physics education

diversity

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There is a good deal of focus on recruiting underrepresented students to study physics at the collegiate level, but a lack of focus on how to make sure they are being recruited into a welcoming and safe environment that values their identity. Because of this, underrepresented students tend to feel a disconnect from the physics community and are more likely to drop out or switch majors. One potential method of combating this issue is increasing the peer networks of these students through informal outreach programs, which give students a sense of purpose, belonging, and confidence in physics. This systematic literature review synthesizes studies on the effects of informal STEM programs on the facilitators and identifies gaps in this research as it pertains to underrepresented students.&nbsp;

technical paper

As part of our volunteer-run nonprofit's efforts to engage students in the US and around the world in learning physics through innovative practices and to supplement their classroom instruction (or lack thereof, as is the case in 40% of US high schools that do not offer physics classes), we organized a virtual summer program this past August, consisting of two parts: a summer school and a summer camp. The former constituted a three-week series of nine innovative lessons in general physics taught by three volunteer instructors - from Harvard and UC Berkeley - live via Zoom and recorded for students from different time zones. The latter involved a series of over twenty facilitator-led online networking sessions for participants from nine countries, in addition to several career panels. Our free pilot program was well-received, and we plan to organize new iterations specifically targeting underrepresented groups, including incarcerated learners. We are seeking partners in facilitating future events or acting as host sites and would welcome your interest.

Summary of Physics Unlimited's Virtual 2020 Summer Program

This talk will introduce two High School level contemporary Physics activities that can be easily integrated into a standard High School Physics curriculum in either an in-person or online environment. These are activities that take the concepts of the conservation of mass, energy, and momentum into the relativistic realm and demonstrate the statistical techniques used in HEP analysis. Where to find these QuarkNet activities and others like them on the Data Portfolio section of the QuarkNet website will also be discussed. These are also two activities that can be used as preparation for the LHC Data Workshop to be discussed in later talks.

CMS-related activities in LHC Data Workshop

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused educators to revisit almost every aspect of teaching and learning, including assessment.&nbsp; In spring of 2020, the Advanced Placement program found itself with the challenge of quickly designing, administering, and grading their exams in a purely online environment.&nbsp; This talk will share observations of the 2020 AP Physics exams and discuss how these observations helped shape the author's design and administration of online exams and quizzes.&nbsp; Examples of several styles of questions administered through the course management system at the author’s university will be included.

Designing Online Assessments: Inspirations from the 2020 AP Physics Exam

Jupyter notebooks [ JN ] are&nbsp;rapidly becoming the tool of choice of rmodelling the mechanics of physics calculation and investigation. This open source tool is used in research, engineering as well as compter and data science.&nbsp; It can also be an effective tool for classroom use at the high school level as well.&nbsp; A framework for introducing and using using jupyter notebooks as a model for student engagement in topics presented at the high school level will be presented.&nbsp; In the form of Google's&nbsp;CoLab (a cloud based implementation of JN ) it&nbsp;can also allow remote interaction with distance learning students through shared documents as well.

Using Jupyter Notebooks in the High School Classroom

For the past fifty years, undergraduate physics programs have struggled with the underrepresentation of women. The STEP UP project (STEPUPphysics.org) was designed to reduce barriers for women in physics&nbsp;and encourage high school women to pursue an undergraduate physics degree. STEP UP focuses on implementing high school interventions by working with cohorts of high school physics teachers called Ambassadors, who are trained to teach and propagate STEP UP's research-driven materials throughout their teacher networks. To understand the effects of Ambassador training, several surveys are being administered to Ambassadors throughout the school year.&nbsp; Taking a “tempered radicals” framing, this talk will present an analysis of initial survey responses and the characteristics of teachers who are willing to be disruptive in order to reduce barriers. Results will inform the future selection of Ambassadors, guide STEP UP training, and be relevant to other programs seeking to develop “tempered radicals” in their communities.

Identifying “Tempered Radicals” in the STEP UP Ambassador Program

We conducted a series of multiple linear regressions to examine the predictive ability of race on introductory mechanics final exam scores when controlling for ACT math scores and physics placement test scores. When we followed a common method of categorizing students as URMs and non-URMS for our analysis, we found that students who earned comparable scores on the ACT math test and the physics placement test performed similarly on the final exam. However, when we established separate groups for Non-Hispanic White American, Asian American, African American, Hispanic, International, Multi-Race, AIAN, and NHPI students, we found that African American and Asian American students, and to a lesser extent, Hispanic students, under-performed in their physics course relative to their prior test scores. We conclude that there is still work to be done at the university level to provide a learning environment supportive of students of all backgrounds.

URM Grouping Hides Struggles of Black and Asian American Students

The COVID-19 outbreak has introduced unexpected barriers and uncertainty for prospective graduate students and physics departments. Chief among concerns are the safety and health of students, and the economic shortfall resulting from reduced enrollment.Such concerns may significantly disrupt the application and admittance processes; of particular concern is the impacts on the diversity of incoming graduate cohorts. Using&nbsp; exploratory survey data collected from physics departments in Fall 2020, we will report on how COVID-19 has impacted the processes, pressures, and demographics of physics graduate programs, including the effects of various departmental responses and preparation. We will present practices implemented by departments, with special attention paid to those that have been successful in maintaining the size, diversity, and preparedness of the 2020 graduate cohort. The findings of this study will inform on actions related to recruiting, admissions, and/or post-admissions that will support graduate admissions in the coming years.

Practices that Maintain Excellence and Diversity in the COVID-19 Era

There is currently a push by researchers and disability advocates to introduce inclusive teaching strategies and universal design principles into physics classrooms. With this push, it is important to study how the attitudes and actions of instructors vary as they consider implementing these guidelines. We used a modified version of the Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory (ITSI) to survey 249 physicists recruited at American Physical Society conferences and through physics-specific listservs. This study presents how practicing physicists’ responses varied across different identity markers, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and personal disability experience. We will compare our findings from the physics community to findings from general populations of both students and faculty.&nbsp;

Variations in Practicing Physicists' Beliefs about Inclusive Teaching Strategies

In this talk, we share preliminary findings from a study of teachers' ideas about equitable-based instruction and how it can be integrated with energy-focused physics instruction. During a one-week professional development workshop, we observed high school physics teachers’ (n=24) conversations focused on formulating ideas to integrate equity and energy within their classroom curriculum, pedagogies, and settings. Data was collected through video recordings and the data analysis was multidimensional. We found that as teachers considered integrating equity into their energy instruction, they raised concerns about relationships with students and about balancing past and present systematic factors. They also articulated a number of strategies and possibilities that they had tried or wanted to try to address these systematic factors&nbsp; This study has implications for merging energy and equity through a culturally-relevant lens that is essential to addressing educational disparities.&nbsp;

Secondary Physics Teachers’ Ideas about Integrating Equity into Energy Instruction

Research shows that by the time female students reach high school age they are much less likely than male students to see themselves as “physics people,” which contributes to the persistent underrepresentation of women in physics. To this end, physics teachers can play a critical role in changing young women’s negative self-perceptions with respect to physics and help develop their physics identity by disrupting traditional cultural messaging and norms. However, the long existing culture of power in many physics classrooms may not provide a safe space for female students to enact physics identities in ways that are personally meaningful. Thus, counterspaces beyond existing classrooms are needed to create and sustain such changes. In this study, we describe how an informal physics club initiated by a high school physics teacher and run by his female students has become a counterspace that promotes physics identity development among students, particularly for female students.

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