United States

Physics mentors play an important role in supporting students in postsecondary education and in their transition to graduate school and careers. The knowledge and beliefs physics mentors have about disability can affect how they mentor students with disabilities. We administered the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS) to 237 practicing physicists recruited through physics-specific listservs to measure their knowledge about disability and beliefs about the viability of physics careers for people with different disability diagnoses. This study compares practicing physicists’ varied knowledge about different categories of impairments and diagnoses, and their beliefs about the viability of future careers for students with specific impairments. We present our findings examining the knowledge of practicing physicists about disability, their beliefs about the viability of certain physics careers for people with disabilities, and how those beliefs may vary depending on their personal disability experience.

AAPT SM 21

Examining Physicists’ Perspectives of Career Viability and Knowledge of Impairment

dpcs

disability

equity

inclusion

diversity

survey

**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)

PERC SM 21

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

technical paper

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

Please log in with your AAPT account or register for the event if you haven't already.

If you are registered please note that you need to be logged in with your AAPT email / credentials in order to get access.

Postponing work impacts virtually everyone at some point, especially students. We found academic procrastination is easily observed among students by studying the student’s online submission times. We characterized physics student assignment completion times (ie. procrastintation) behaviors for online homework assignments into 4 completion time classes that clearly distinguish between week-to-week patterns, mean course grades, assignment completion rates, and proportion of women. Consistent with many studies, we find that procrastinating students tend to have lower course grades. Closer examination of exam and non-exam grade components reveals that exam and non-exam components are separately predicted by the two “orthogonal” measures, ACT score and completion time, and we propose that these are measuring so-called cognitive and non-cognitive factors, respectively. Identification of procrastinating students (using completion time) could be important in measuring non-cognitive factors that lead to early identification of at-risk students in physics courses.

Procrastination patterns impact on assignment submission times and grade components

What are the conditions for students to experience real joy in physics learning? Work from authors like Valerie Kaur & Brené Brown suggests that one of the conditions is the opportunity for students to make the continuous choice of being in the emotional discomfort of learning. In this research presentation we will explore frameworks for connecting discomfort to joy in physics learning . To ground our thinking, we will use video data from one group of students in an Introductory Physics for Life Science majors course, who are collaborating on a computational activity to understand physics concepts. We present the analysis of one student’s learning experience, working on a computational activity of containing particles in a box and modeling diffusion, using a lens of joy and discomfort.

Can learning physics be both joyous and uncomfortable?

Informal physics programs facilitate learning spaces that allow for physicists, physics students, and public audiences to interact and engage with each other in a variety of formats, such as public lectures, summer camps and open houses. We want to understand how programs can be sustained over time, and thus, we are interested in documenting the critical organizational dimensions of informal programming, like personnel involved, audience satisfaction, and program content. To identify main challenges across programs, we conducted surveys, interviews with lead program facilitators, and site visits to multiple programs of varying formats. From emergent themes and challenges in our data analysis, we are developing and validating a model for the key organizational components of informal physics programs. In this talk, we share our current key components model of informal programs and discuss future work to develop tools for program facilitators to assess their programs.

Identifying the key organizational components of informal physics programming

In this case study, a small group of secondary students learning geometrical optics with support of a computer simulation was followed. The aim of the study was to observe the how the students make meaning in an inquiry-based learning situation. We used a social semiotic framework to study how the students transfer information using different modalities.

Developing fluency using multiple representations in geometrical optics.

In previous work and in the literature, we have identified multiple reasons why physics problem solvers may generate diagrams as part of the problem-solving process: to orient to the problem; to serve as a tool that is manipulated to help reach an answer; to serve as a means of communication; and/or because it is a habitual part of problem solving. In this talk, we discuss a follow-up study in which we first observe students and instructors solving problems to see what role diagrams play in that process, then we explicitly ask them about their use and beliefs about diagrams generated as part of problem solving. We compare student and instructor use of and beliefs around diagrams as part of an effort to inform pedagogical approaches to teaching diagramming in physics courses.

Asking Why Students and Instructors Draw Diagrams While Problem Solving

Research has shown that students’ achievement in science courses as well as their persistence within STEM fields is correlated to a student’s sense of self-efficacy -- the confidence in one’s own ability to perform a task. Traditionally, quantitative changes in a student’s self-efficacy over an academic semester have been measured using pre- and post-test surveys. However, with the complexity of the construct of self-efficacy, a pre-post design may warrant limitations in deeply understanding the impacts curricular and co-curricular activities have on students’ sense of self-efficacy. To investigate the dynamics of students’ self-efficacy in finer detail, we employed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) -- self-reported, in-the-moment measurements of student experiences over time. Using the results from our pilot study, we will present how we employed the ESM to measure students’ self-efficacy while performing various tasks throughout the week, the validity of our measurements, and the possible versatility of the ESM within STEM education.

The Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Dynamics of Students’ Self-Efficacy

We conducted a study on students’ motivational beliefs and grades in a two-term college calculus-based introductory physics sequence to investigate how the perception of learning environment predicts students’ self-efficacy, interest, identity and grades. Findings can be useful in creating equitable and inclusive learning environments in which all students can thrive. We thank the National Science Foundation for support.

How perception of learning environment predicts students' grades and motivational characteristics

Self-efficacy has been shown to affect student engagement, learning, and persistence in various science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses and majors. Additionally, prior research has shown that women have lower self-efficacy than men in STEM courses in which women are outnumbered by men. This study examines the self-efficacy of men and women with similar performance in two consecutive algebra-based introductory physics courses in which women make up two-thirds of the students. These were mandatory courses at a large public university in the US taken primarily by bioscience majors, many of whom are interested in health professions. Our findings show a gender gap in self-efficacy disadvantaging women when controlling for course grades in both physics 1 and physics 2 both at the beginning and end of the course. Additionally, we find that most of the gender gap in self-efficacy is due to biased perceptions rather than performance in the courses.

Physics self-efficacy of male and female students controlling for grade

Dyslexia affects 5-15% of the US population (depending on how it is measured, meaning that essentially all of us who are physics instructors have people with dyslexia in our introductory courses. Through intensive tutoring of a high school student during pandemic remote instruction, I became more aware of some physics reasoning strengths said to be common to dyslexic students, such as fluency with graphical representations. I have also become clearer on some of the barriers that typical physics courses place in the way of dyslexic students’ learning, such as complex textual representations, the specialized grammar of textbook problems, and the prohibition on talking out loud during exams. In this informal talk, a dyslexic learner and I share our lived experiences and recommendations for making physics teaching more dyslexic-friendly.

Toward more dyslexic-friendly physics teaching

Physics is not often portrayed as a field that helps individuals to satisfy communal goals, but rather is portrayed as a more self-serving career field that helps individuals achieve agentic goals. For students considering their future careers, this may dissuade more communally-driven students from pursuing a physics or physics-related career. In this study, we examine the correlations between communal/agentic goals endorsement and physics identity. As a part of the STEP UP project, data were collected from the classrooms of 16 high school physics teachers in three distinct regions of the U.S. We will present a regression model which uses goal endorsement to predict student physics identity, and how the model differs between different populations of students.

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