Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) are an increasingly large set of higher education institutions. From 2010-2020 the number of HSIs went from 311 to 569. Within the PER community, research perspectives from HSIs have provided critical insights into how to support racially and ethnically diverse students in physics education. This presentation will investigate the number of physics education researchers at HSIs, the fraction of HSIs that have physics education researchers, and demographic data from IPEDS providing information about how HSIs contribute to the diversity of undergraduate physics students and graduate physics students in comparison to other institutions. In addition, we will examine themes from funded research and publications at HSIs to highlight how physics education researchers center their HSI’s unique student population in their research and what ways these unique populations advance physics education research.  

The physics gender gap is a well-known discrepancy in performance between male and female students despite having similar prior preparation. With an increase in the use of technology, new ways of instruction have been developed such as Interactive Video-EnhancedTutorials (IVETs). The IVETs involve web-based activities that lead students through a problem solution using expert-like problem-solving approaches. Several IVETs were evaluated by comparing the performance of students who completed the IVET with those who watched a non-interactive video solution (control group) which utilizes the same problem-solving approaches as the IVET on a paired problem on the same concepts. Results show that for the IVET group, women who had collectively performed worse on the previous exam, either reduced or reversed the gap between them and their male counterparts on the paired problem, while in the control group, there was no difference from the results of the previous exam.

In this project we investigated the state of disparities in learning outcomes in North Carolina high school physics classrooms. We proctored the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) to ~1500 first semester, introductory college physics students, who attended high school in NC, prior to college instruction. With an appended demographic survey, we investigated disparities in FCI scores by gender, ethnicity, and highest level of high school physics taken. When controlling for highest level of physics taken, men consistently scored higher on average, with women scoring approximately 62% of what men scored, even while overall student scores increased with higher level of prior course. When controlling for ethnicity the gender performance gap remained. When controlling for gender we saw performance gaps between white/Asian students and Black/Hispanic students. These results suggest that there may be conditions within North Carolina high school physics classrooms that lead to inequitable learning outcomes among students of differing identities.

I will report the results of using student story-telling as a pedagogical technique  in physics that I have  applied to four college courses: a two-semester Introductory Physics course, Modern Physics, and Statistical Mechanics. Students were asked to research biographies of physicists and present 5-7 minute summaries that went beyond a narration of facts and events but provide context and connections. Students were asked to focus on what motivated physicists to study physics, what challenges they faced, their contributions and hobbies apart from physics, and how they interacted with other scientists in their time. A special effort was made to promote story-telling of the background and contributions of women and minorities in physics. I will report on student responses and reactions to this effort, based on blind surveys, exam results and  general observations.

Goals for inclusivity can be met in physics classrooms that focus on self-advocacy and empowerment through disciplinary practices, foci that are critical in high school physics courses and pre-service teacher preparation programs. We’ve published work demonstrating that in such learning environments, learning gains are similar for students from minority and majority groups. These data provide the foundation for PEER Physics, a curriculum-driven professional learning community for both High School physics and teacher preparation. We now evaluate these courses from a new perspective by exploring student attitudes and beliefs towards physics and their physics learning experiences, as assessed using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and student reflections. Comparisons of student attitudes before and after their course experience suggest they came to see science in a way more similar to how experts do, and these shifts in opinion were greater among traditionally underserved student groups.