Reseachers have shown self-efficacy - or one's confidence in their abilities to complete a task -- predicts persistence and achievement in science. Within academia, students may encounter threats or supports to their self-efficacy that may eventually influence their persistence in the sciences. To examine these threatening or supportive moments in a student's experience, we employed a mixed methods approach. Our approach couples the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a technique that uses surveys to probe a numeric measurement of a student's domain-specific self-efficacy, with individualized daily journal reflections. In our design, the ESM survey responses informed the writing of the individualized daily journal prompts, which, in turn, link quantitative and qualitative data sources. In this talk, we will discuss how our point of integration changed over two iterations of data collection; specifically, how the use of the open-ended survey questions influenced how we further probed into students’ self-efficacy. 

As the physics education community continues to push for more equitable classroom and academic practices, there is a need for more explicit attention to the experiences of LGBTQ+ physics students. This ongoing study strives to better understand LGBTQ+ students’ experiences in college via interviews with LGBTQ+ undergraduate and graduate students across multiple higher education institutions in California. Interviews focus on students’ perceptions of physics as a major for LGBTQ+ people, their support systems, and ways that their identities (LGBTQ+ and others) have affected their college careers. Preliminary results of emerging themes from interviews and potential takeaways will be shared.

At large public institutions with a high undergraduate to faculty ratio, traditionally underrepresented students in academia face unique obstacles in accessing research opportunities. As research is a vital part of an undergraduate physics education, creating tools to counter this disparity is essential. 

We present The Undergraduate Lab at Berkeley (ULAB), an undergraduate-led course designed to introduce research to underrepresented and marginalized students at UC Berkeley. ULAB takes a two-pronged approach: students learn research skills via lectures and gain hands-on experience with an undergraduate mentor. In a small group of their peers, ULAB mentees propose and conduct a year-long project that simulates formal undergraduate research. 

We evaluate the efficacy of the program through a survey that adresses students' sense of belonging and confidence in research skills within ULAB and the greater physics community. Building on a pilot survey conducted during the 2021-22 academic year, we take a more qualitative approach by emphasizing student testimonials from current and past years. In conjunction with the Berkeley Undergraduate Research Evaluation Tools (BURET) group, we measure the success of the program and investigate how ULAB may further support diversity, equity, and inclusion in physics and astronomy.   

Many conceptual and theoretical frameworks in education research tend to value social and cultural capital from the most privileged groups and focus on what people from marginalized groups are “lacking.” This kind of research often employs a deficit model of understanding the experiences of people marginalized in education. To fully understand the academic experiences of students from marginalized groups it is important to focus on the capital these groups use to overcome challenges. The Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework values resources Communities of Color have to help them through various systems such as education. The goal of this project is to understand which forms of CCW students in physics bridge programs utilize during their academic journey. Specifically, we wanted to understand which forms of CCW students utilize when deciding to pursue graduate education in physics and when they face challenges while in graduate school. To do so, we conducted semi-structured interviews with participants in physics bridge programs from 4 different institutions, and used qualitative coding to identify examples of each of the 6 types of CCW. 

Course structures – which encompass curriculum materials and activities, how this curriculum is enacted, how students are assessed, and other course logistics and policies – impact students’ learning, beliefs about themselves as learners, and motivation. As part of an effort to redesign course structures to increase student success in introductory physics at the University of Illinois, we conducted 30 1-hour, semi-structured interviews with introductory physics students to investigate their experiences with our local course structures. These students described their perceptions of course features in terms of four major functions: defining learning tasks, supporting collaboration, providing opportunities for feedback, and determining grades. How students experienced these functions depends both on the design of the component’s particular features and on the students’ personal orientations. For illustrative case comparisons, we will present the different ways students attend to and interpret features of weekly small-group problem solving sections in physics and chemistry. A future goal of this work is to support integrated (rather than piecemeal) course design efforts by understanding how multiple course features and components come together to impact students.