As we near the 25^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), more individuals with disabilities have been able to access education and employment. However, disabled individuals still experience great difficulties in terms of accessibility at professional research conferences, which are necessary for establishing their standing within a field. To combat this issue, AAPT and PERTG have created the Working Group for Conference Accessibility (WGCA), a vital addition to its conference planning process. As members of the WGCA, our mission is to ensure that all participants, regardless of physical abilities, sensory profiles, or diverse needs, can fully engage in the conference experience. In this poster, we present an overview of our objectives, strategies, and the services we offer to enhance accessibility for all attendees. We invite questions and comments from our disabled peers and our allies to help us stay committed to creating a more accessible and equitable future.

A one-hour, first-year seminar is suggested as a means of retaining undergraduate physics majors in AIP’s EP3 Guide. Such a seminar (first-year colloquium, FYC) was implemented at a small, four-year institution in the US with both retention and recruitment benefits.  Specifically, over an eight-year period where this FYC was implemented, the physics program more than doubled in number of majors and graduates. Moreover, the number of women in the program increased by 200% over the same period.  The inclusive design of this FYC model confirms EP3’s suggestions while also facilitating efficacy in other programmatic innovations. This FYC model also offers an anecdotal example of women leading men students into a greater sense of non-hostile, cohort-building, indicated by the overall programmatic growth.

Despite increasing participation of women in many STEM fields, girls continue to face barriers in developing confidence and self-efficacy in physics classrooms. We have implemented targeted interventions at an all-girls secondary school (grades 5-12) to change the culture in the classroom around fear of failure and perfectionism - two inhibitors to girl’s confidence – by providing multiple modalities for revising work and engaging in iterative problem-solving. Specific techniques include language that normalizes confusion and failure, implementing project-based units with critique periods, strategies around test revisions, and scaffolding complex problem-solving to value productive struggle. We share practical strategies and outcomes from our school-based efforts to improve girls’ confidence in learning physics by encouraging resilience through iterative work in the physics classroom.

As students and teachers recover from the COVID pandemic, there is a clear need to continue re-examining our educational norms including access to challenging coursework, grades, the role of homework, and the use of technology for practice and assessment. This poster describes both successes and challenges encountered when adapting the grading philosophy and assessment practices described in Joe Feldman's book, Grading for Equity, to an AP Physics C course.

Past and current AP exam data, student work, and feedback from last year's students suggest that updated grading practices, including a "no points for homework" policy and a system for revision and retakes, provided more accurate formative assessment, better measurement of mastery, and increased student engagement and achievement.

In this presentation, the author, a 20-year science teacher, will share the process of implementing Grading for Equity in a high-school physics classroom, and the way these changes helped her 12^th AP Physics C class accomplish a post-pandemic "comeback."