United States

In order to make physics more diverse and inclusive, it is important to recognize and understand factors preventing students from pursuing physics. The effect of spiritual goals and religiousness on physics career choice is an understudied area in the physics education community, despite there being known historic tensions between religion and science in the West (e.g. the Inquisition of Galileo). Drawing on publicly accessible national survey data from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), we examine the effect of spiritual/religious goals on choosing a physics major for US freshmen college students. Our study shows that students who identify themselves as more spiritual/religious are significantly less likely to choose physics as their majors. In addition, we examine how the effect of spirituality/religiousness is different for students from underrepresented groups such as women, African American/Black students, and Hispanic students.

PERC SM 20

The Effect of Spirituality and Religiousness on Students Physics Career Choice in the US

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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?

Emergent Explicit Group Regulation in Scientific Inquiry

Musings on how to understand the specific affordances of labs

Instructional Pragmatism: Using a Variety of Evidence-based Approaches Flexibly to Improve Student Learning

Students' Reasoning during Qualitative Physics Problem Solving

Shared Resources in Student Understanding of Spherical Unit Vectors in Upper-division E&M

The Physics GRE does not help "overlooked" applications

This work applied exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and graded Item Response Theory (IRT) to a large sample (N=4522) of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) post-test scores. EFA failed to reproduce the factor structure suggested by the authors of the CLASS and strongly supported the alternate 3-factor model suggested by Douglas et al. Graded IRT allowed an examination of the progression from non-expert-like to expert-like beliefs. This progression was generally uniform with a linear relation between the difficulty of each step in the progression. Some items within the factors identified by Douglas et al. had difficulty and discrimination parameters substantially different than other items in the factor suggesting the subscale is not unidimensional. The expert-like latent ability trait estimated by IRT correlated more strongly with measures of physics performance than measures of general academic performance indicating that expert-like beliefs are not a general property of high performing students.

Exploring the CLASS with Item Response Theory

Many students leave secondary school without having an appropriate conceptual understanding of simple circuits. Voltage in particular has proven to be a difficult concept. Furthermore, research has shown that girls tend to have a lower interest in physics than boys. However, it is unclear whether decades of research on students conceptual difficulties e.g. with voltage as well as research into ways to promote girls interest have had a significant impact on physics classrooms. For this reason, the conceptual understanding of electric circuits as well as the interest in physics of N = 1207 traditionally taught students in Germany and Austria was assessed using a valid and reliable multiple-choice test. The presented poster will report on the key findings of this assessment which suggest that girls are still not as interested in physics as boys and that students do not have an adequate conceptual understanding of voltage even after instruction.

Evaluating secondary school students interest and conceptual understanding of circuits

We analyzed the climate experiences of LGBT+ physicists through an online survey (N=324) collected by the committee on LGBT+ physicists for the American Physical Society. Results demonstrated the impact of workplace climate (positive and negative), the observation and experience of exclusionary behavior, and status as a student on how out physicists were about their LGBT+ identity. We found that being a student, exposure to exclusionary behavior, and both positive and negative workplace climate were significant predictors of outness to coworkers. The climate model can explain 22% of the variance in outness using these significant features. The results indicate that a positive workplace climate is a strong predictor of outness suggesting the further importance of proactively inclusive physics communities.

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The Effect of Spirituality and Religiousness on Students Physics Career Choice in the US

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