United States

Recent work by Kanim and Cid [1] suggests that the data used in PER is not representative of students enrolled in physics courses at the national level. Using university-level demographics, Kanim and Cid showed that PER studies oversample from white, wealthy, mathematically-prepared populations of students. What we do not yet know is whether these university-level demographics are representative of introductory physics courses, which are a primary site of research in PER. In this paper we present data from six US institutions, comparing the composition of introductory physics classes to aggregate university demographics in terms of gender and race and/or ethnicity. Our aim is to make progress in characterizing the demographics of introductory physics courses, which is imperative to deepening our understanding of how social disparity is manifested in physics classrooms and the institutions that host them. We discuss limitations of our approach, including problematizing the use of statistics to make sense of who is enrolling in introductory physics.

PERC SM 20

Toward Characterizing the Demographics of Introductory Physics Courses (PERC)

demographics; oppression; gender; race/ethnicity

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AAPT SM 21

poster

Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

We use the theory of community of practice to describe engagement in authentic practices in the context of an online discussion board of high school physics teachers. The class, associated with a new Master program in physics with teaching emphasis requires students to participate in weekly problem-solving and biweekly reading reflection discussion boards. We take a social network analysis approach to investigate how members of an online teacher community interact with each other through a nine-week classical mechanics summer course. We found that the participation of students in the problem-solving discussions fluctuates from week to week; a result of the structural features of the course. Comparatively, the reading reflection participation did not show a noticeable variation. In order to gain more insight into our findings, and reveal the course's structural features, we characterized posts by looking for emergent themes Participation in an Online Community of High School Physics Teachers

Participation in an Online Community of High School Physics Teachers

The curriculum-focused [actual name masked for this review] faculty online learning community was established to provide extended support to faculty implementing a student-centered physics and physical science curriculum. Through regular, facilitator-led, online meetings of small groups, faculty raise and discuss issues of teaching and learning pertinent to the curriculum. In this paper we introduce the Flow of Conversation tool, developed to identify meeting prompts from both facilitators and non-facilitators that initiate discussion about issues of teaching and learning. We showcase the application of this tool to a community meeting taking place after the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated transition to online instruction. In this particular meeting, the tool allowed us to perceive the shared agency between facilitators and non-facilitators in raising and responding to consequential issues of teaching and learning. We suggest this tool may be appropriate for investigating facilitated meetings in other professional communities, where members are positioned to contribute meaningfully towards the progression of knowledge.

A tool for documenting and analyzing the flow of conversation about teaching and learning in facilitated faculty conversations

Interviews with high school students in a city in Europe suggest that student naïve ideas about radioactivity can shift fluidly from one context to another. We encourage instructors to consider this context-sensitivity when helping students learn about radioactivity. An example of instruction that has such consideration built into it is Yamamotos The Radiation Around Us, an instructional unit in HypothesisExperiment Class (HEC), the educational approach proposed by Itakura. HEC expects that individual students may simultaneously have multiple ways of thinking about a given situation, and several measures are put in place to support students in drawing on these various views. We will discuss how the Radiation Around Us respects and encourages simultaneous ideas from students (and hence fluidity of student reasoning). We will also present data from high school students suggesting that the intention of the curriculum to foster fluidity in student reasoning actually has an effect on students.

Respecting fluidity of student ideas: student-centered and enjoyable lessons about radioactivity

This project aims to create and evaluate an environment where students of different backgrounds can collaborate in physics public engagement work in order to foster communication skills and develop intersecting identities. In collaboration with Science Gallery Detroit, a team of four undergraduate students, two physics and two design, are working together to create an online platform for public engagement in physics. This team is aiming to create a visually appealing website that allows users to engage with different physics topics. The students choose their favorite topics and a narrative that connects the concepts through everyday life phenomena. In this poster, we present the work in progress platform as well as the research aspect. We use interviews, audio recordings, and weekly reflections to understand how the students develop or expand their physics identities and how the project evolves as the students' understanding of both physics and art evolves.

Physics Communication through Art: Development of Intersecting Identities

The divergence theorem is an important mathematical tool used in many areas of physics, most notably, electricity and magnetism. Students have nominally encountered the divergence theorem in their math courses; however, its application in physics often differs meaningfully from its application in a pure math context. In this paper, we investigate physics students' understanding and interpretation of the divergence theorem through written responses to a brief two-part prompt which was designed to elicit separate responses for students literal and qualitative interpretations of the divergence theorem. This differentiated between understanding the mathematical statement and being able to interpret its fundamental meaning. We found that students provided moderately successful literal interpretations but provided fewer meaningful qualitative interpretations. We also found that the ability to accurately translate the mathematical statement of the divergence theorem appeared to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for being able to provide a meaningful interpretation.

Investigating Upper-Division Students' Interpretations of the Divergence Theorem

The observed performance difference between women and men on assessments in physics---the ``gender gap''---is a significant and persistent inequity which has broad implications for the participation of women in physics. Research also shows that gender-based inequities extend to affective measures, such as self-efficacy. In this exploratory study, we report on gender disparities in self-efficacy and test anxiety and their relationship to assessment scores in our active-learning introductory physics course. Overall, gender-based differences in favour of men are observed in all our measures, with women having lower scores on measures associated with success (self-efficacy and assessment scores) and a higher score on a possibly detrimental affective factor (test anxiety). Using a multiple regression model-selection process to explore which measures may explain end-of-course Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and final exam scores, we find that the best fitting models include FCI pretest and self-efficacy as predictors, but do not include test anxiety.

Exploring the contributions of self-efficacy and test anxiety to gender differences in assessments

Increased emphasis has been given to students engagement with experimental data as reform efforts have continued to transform the landscape of introductory physics laboratory courses, resulting in greater opportunities for authentic scientific inquiry and student agency. As a result, students become the primary driving forces of their own experimentation, and the manner in which they engage with experimental data becomes more complex and nonlinear. This poster presents an illumination of the nuanced ways students enact various data-based actions when conducting physics experiments. We present a case-study of a group engaging in an inquiry-based physics laboratory to highlight the complex and iterative ways the group shifts between multiple data-based actions. Results show that students oftentimes shift between multiple data-based actions in short timescales and that these shifts can take place with implicit iterative patterns, even when the instructional setting is structured for a single experimental step.

Students’ dynamic engagement with experimental data in a physics laboratory setting

Nearly half of STEM majors in the United States express interest in becoming a grade 7-12 teacher, yet as a nation we face a shortage of qualified math and science teachers. Studies have found that misperceptions about grade 7-12 math and science teaching are impacting student career choices. As part of a nation-wide project, this work addresses faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching because faculty play an important role in student career decisions. Additionally, understanding how faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching differ may inform targeted efforts to change perceptions in the future. In this study, nearly 500 college STEM faculty members perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching were measured using a newly developed survey. Faculty perceptions were then compared based on department affiliation, position type, and gender. No significantly practical differences were found based on these demographics. Implications for STEM teacher recruitment are discussed.

Maybe we aren’t that different after all: Faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching as a career

The Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation is commonly used to measure the conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Several studies have reported a substantial difference in pretest scores between men and women. This study examines the contribution of several prior preparation factors to explain the variance in pretest score and whether these factors explain gender differences in the pretest score. The study examined a large sample ($N=1060$) of students taking introductory calculus-based mechanics at the university level. Women outperformed men on most prior preparation and college achievement measures. No significant differences between men and women were found in high school physics taking patterns. Linear regression analysis showed only 23\% of the variance in FMCE pretest score could be explained using a linear combination of prior preparation variables. Controlling for these variables failed to explain the gender difference in pretest scores; conversely, the gender difference increased controlling for prior preparation.

What does the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation pretest measure?

Bright Club is a public-facing event where academics from every discipline use stand-up comedy to communicate their research. Bright Club Ireland has been running for five years, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, and incorporates comedic theatre approaches to empower speakers and build community. High production values, venues associated with comedy, and professional videos of Bright Club sets on YouTube have all contributed to the perception of Bright Club as high quality entertainment rather than traditional outreach. We have found that comedy is effective at breaking down traditional silos of knowledge, upending status hierarchies, and including audiences who might not feel comfortable going to a university campus or attending events with science in the name. Here we describe the Bright Club Ireland program, who attends these shows and why, and analyse impact of participation on speakers using Self-Determination Theory.

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Toward Characterizing the Demographics of Introductory Physics Courses (PERC)

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