Despite the importance of and frequency with which scientists present their research, discipline-specific written and oral communication skills are rarely taught in the physical sciences. Acknowledging and seeking to address this inconsistency, we have applied the writing in the discipline (WID) framework to our required, year-long Senior Physics Capstone Project. Teaching students physics-specific communication skills in this course is particularly advantageous because our students are required to present the results of their research at numerous venues and through a variety of modalities throughout the year, which provide natural opportunities for feedback and revision. Since integrating WID into the course, we have seen a measurable increase in students' use of correct technical language, and in their ability to present their work in discipline-appropriate formats.

A successful research team and project require the participants to apply a diverse set of skills and habits. However, in the traditional training experience early-career researchers typically do not learn these elements until they are already in the midst of a research activity. In collaboration with the Fermilab Quarknet high-school research internship program, we developed a pilot research curriculum to help prepare the students with essential research skills. In this curriculum, we discuss how to come up with research topics, how to read scientific papers, how to approach the research process and provide training sessions for research communications.  For this presentation, we will describe our goals for developing this program, and how we carried out our pilot in the summer of 2021, and plans for evaluating and updating the program.

Physics students can enjoy learning soft skills that will be useful for future professional careers. Enhancing soft skills will help physics students to have successful careers. We would like to explore the possibilities to embed emotional intelligence into physics classrooms. 

In a previous study, we found that secondary school students already have strong feelings (usually negative) about doing physics and what the discipline is inherently about. Therefore we suspect that elementary education may not be doing an adequate job at informing students about physics, especially when compared to the other major science disciplines. We have examined elementary school science curricula (K-5) from multiple states, some of which adopt the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and some which do not. In our analysis, we focus on how much physics is discussed in elementary science curricula compared to the other main branches of science (biology and chemistry), as well as comparing curricula of states that adopt NGSS versus those that do not.