Related papers: The Decrease in Physics Enrollment
Over the past year and a half we have developed an innovative approach to the teaching of `Physical Science', a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. The new approach uses popular…
In April 2019, Aycock et al. published "Sexual harassment reported by undergraduate female physicists" in Phys. Rev. PER. Their main finding is that 3/4 of undergraduate women in physics in the U.S. report experiencing sexual harassment.…
Despite nation efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, women and gender minorities remain underrepresented in physics. One common approach to studying gender in physics contexts treats gender as a categorical identity variable (e.g.…
We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…
Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
This article describes five common student misconceptions about succeeding in college-level Physics courses: the miracle finish, the soft hearted professor, an extension of high school, weak areas won't be tested, and passing is more…
At many universities, astronomy is a popular way for non-science majors to fulfill a general education requirement. Because general-education astronomy may be the only college-level science course taken by these students, it is the last…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
As part of a larger research project into massively open online courses (MOOCs), we have investigated student background, as well as student participation in a physics MOOC with a laboratory component. Students completed a demographic…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…
It is a well-studied notion that women are under-represented in the physical sciences, with a "leaky pipeline" metaphor describing how the number of women decreases at higher levels in academia[1,2]. It is unclear, however, where the major…
In the first part of the talk, I give a low-resolution overview of the current state of particle physics - the triumph of the Standard Model and its discontents. I review and re-endorse the remarkably direct and (to me) compelling argument…
Gaining recognition as a physics person by peers is an important contributor to undergraduate students' physics identity and their success in physics courses. Previous research has separately demonstrated that women perceive less…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
Gender bias, reduced sense of belonging, and lower physics self-efficacy are among the challenges faced by female students who choose to study physics. Prior studies focusing on this underrepresented group have examined the experiences and…