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We present a study of the demographics of major conferences in heavy ion physics. We look at the distribution of talks by gender for Quark Matter, Strangeness in Quark Matter, Initial Stages, and Hard Probes between 2011–2022. We find that women are often underrepresented among plenary speakers and usually underrepresented among parallel speakers. At Quark Matter, women are more likely to be given a poster presentation in lieu of an oral presentation. The Quark Matter summary talk has never been given by a woman. We discuss the collection of data and possible approaches to make the field more equitable and, therefore, more scientifically productive.

This Resource Letter introduces theory, frameworks, research, and historical information that connect the experiences of people from ethnic/racial groups that have been minoritized and marginalized in science with a focus on physics. This resource is intended for all physicists who teach, advise, work in research groups with, and interact with other people. We start this report with an introduction to orient the audience and situate the resources to follow. We hope this Resource Letter will not only provide resources for the audience to review, but additionally generate conversation and discussions that can serve as a catalyst for making needed changes in physics and physics education.

This Resource Letter introduces issues which influence the representation and participation of women in physics. It is intended for all physicists, regardless of subfield, who teach, advise, or work in research groups with other people. We start with reports, statistics, and literature reviews, give a theoretical framework, and address the intersection of gender with additional identities. Then, we review several factors that impact the participation of women at all levels. We continue with the literature about scientific careers and then talk about “what works” and how women can be supported as physics students and as physicists. We conclude with a call to action.

A critical look at the history of physics—both in the field as a whole and in the pedagogical choices—elucidates why it is necessary to pay attention to social justice in physics education. Physicists have a longstanding aim toward objectivity and often deny the effects of culture on the field and its participants. In this chapter, we provide an overview of research and curriculum development on equity and social justice in physics and include examples for addressing the injustice present in the field today. We illustrate how instructors can introduce and integrate discussions of equity and social justice into physics curricula. We also share an example of how concepts in physics (e.g., optics) can be used to support students in identifying inequities and injustice (e.g., overrepresentation of blue eyes). To be clear, this work does not argue for a dichotomized teaching of social justice and physics. Instead, we call for the utilization of a social justice lens in teaching physics and the exploration of physics concepts to identify and address issues of inequity that exist within and outside of the field of physics.

The United States has a major deficit in the proportion of women earning degrees in physics, peaking around 20%. To promote excellence and maximize creativity, additional efforts to diversify the physics community must be implemented. Challenges to improving the proportion of female physicists include microaggressions, active discouragement, poor advising or mentoring, inadequate acknowledgement of achievements, sexual harassment, and many others. The latest research on gender bias suggests two main underlying psychological themes that explain much of the behavioral bias: implicit (unconscious) bias and stereotype threat. To ensure that excellence is not compromised, we need to guarantee that our entire population has access to adequate resources and the necessary support structures for success. To fully understand women in physics, we must also examine the many obstacles that women of various identities face in efforts to navigate their academic and professional careers. These identities may be related not only to gender but also to race, ethnicity, language, religion, social class, or sexuality. Increasing women’s participation in physics requires increased access to high school physics courses, funding opportunities to attend college, availability of research opportunities, and access to and support from professional societies. These approaches will enhance the culture in physics, leading to gender equity, social equity, and improved social justice for many people.

A website on gender bias in physics (https://genderbias.compadre.com) was created to help women and gender minority physicists communicate their stories, ideas, and questions about gender bias in physics.

In the February 2016 issue of The Physics Teacher, we announced a call for papers on race and physics teaching. The response was muted at first, but has now grown to a respectable chorale-sized volume. As the manuscripts began to come in and the review process progressed, Geraldine Cochran graciously agreed to come on board as co-editor for this remarkable collection of papers, to be published throughout the fall of 2017 in TPT. Upon reviewing the original call and the responses from the physics community, the parallels between generating this collection and the grand call-and-response tradition became compelling. What follows is a conversation constructed by the co-editors that is intended to introduce the reader to the swell of voices that responded to the original call. The authors would like to thank Pam Aycock for providing many useful contributions to this editorial.

We have developed the Douglass-SAS-DIMACS Computer Science Living-Learning Community (LLC) for first-year women at Rutgers, now in its second year. Each year, around 20 first-year women undergraduates at Rutgers who intend to major in computer science are selected for the LLC. LLC participants live in a common dorm and are provided with an educational, mentoring, and community-building program that supports their progress as Rutgers students and as computer science majors. To our knowledge, this is the first undergraduate living-learning community for women in computer science at any university. A focus group conducted with women from the inaugural cohort revealed that faculty support contributed to feelings of belonging, both in the program and in the CS department, among the participants; participants valued the academic support they received as part of the program and felt communication structures within the program were effective; and participants expressed a desire for advanced undergraduate peer mentors. A quasi-experimental study of this cohort indicated that LLC participants showed a decrease in satisfaction with the CS department at Rutgers; a decrease in computing-related self-efficacy; and an increase in the belief that computing ability is inborn. Follow up interviews suggested that the efficacy of the LLC might be dependent on two factors: participants' commitment to a CS major coming into the program and participants' level of involvement with the LLC group. In response to these results, we have made some changes to the program and continue to carefully study the program in order to maximize its effectiveness.

Initiatives to increase the number, persistence, and success of women in physics in the United States reach preteen girls through senior women. Programs exist at both the local and national levels. In addition, researchers have investigated issues related to gender equity in physics and physics education. Anecdotal evidence suggests increased media coverage of the underrepresentation of women in science. All of these efforts are motivated and made more effective by the continued collection and presentation of data on the presence, persistence, and promise of women in physics.

Continuing our work from a previous study (Coble et al. 2013), we examine undergraduates’ ideas on the composition of the Universe as they progress through a general education astronomy integrated lecture and laboratory course with a focus on active learning. The study was conducted over five semesters at an urban minority-serving institution. The data collected include individual interviews (N1⁄4 15) and course artifacts (N 60), such as prelab surveys, and midterm and final exam questions in a variety of formats. We find that students easily obtain a superficial knowledge of the origins of the chemical elements and the existence of dark matter and dark energy, which they are generally unaware of pre-instruction. However, they are hindered in their ability to reproduce the argument for the existence of dark matter at least in part because of weaknesses in their graph-reading abilities.

At Florida International University we have implemented a learning assistant (LA) program based on the Colorado Learning Assistant Model. [1] As a part of this program, students take a course on science and mathematics education theory and practice in which they are required to submit written reflections. Past anecdotal evidence suggests that students in the LAP at Florida International University are using these writing assignments to reflect on their teaching experiences. The purpose of this study was to a) determine if the writing assignments submitted give evidence that our students are engaging in reflection and b) determine if our students are engaging in deep levels of reflection. In this investigation, we relied on a rubric based on Hatton and Smith's (1995) [2] "Criteria for the Recognition of Evidence for Different Types of Reflective Writing." In this paper, we document a) a system for characterizing student reflections and b) how we give them feedback.

In order to improve instruction in introductory astronomy, we are investigating students’ preinstructional ideas about a number of cosmology topics. This article describes one aspect of this large research study in which 1270 students responded to a subset of three questions each from a larger set of questions about the following areas: definition of a light-year and the structure, composition, and evolution of the Universe. Within structure, we investigated students’ ideas about definitions or descriptions of Solar System, Galaxy, Universe, and the relationships among them. Composition included the formation of chemical elements, dark matter, and dark energy, while evolution focused on the Big Bang Theory, age of the Universe, and how the Universe changes over time. Responses were iteratively coded for common themes. Major findings demonstrate that students commonly misidentify the light-year as a measurement of time, and that they provide incomplete definitions of common objects (Solar System, Galaxy) and the Universe itself, often conflating the terms. Generally speaking, students have little understanding of dark matter or dark energy, providing definitions that are superficial or do not answer the question. Consistent with previous research, we found students view the Big Bang as an explosion. Students’ ideas about the age of the Universe range from millions to trillions of years, but some students believe the Universe to be infinitely old. For both the age of the Universe and the Big Bang Theory, students are not familiar with the scientific evidence that exists, and in some cases do not believe such evidence can exist. Finally, students’ understanding of how the Universe changes over time is based largely on smaller changes of objects within it (e.g., stellar evolution) or the motions of objects (e.g., planetary orbits). These and other ideas provide fodder—both scientifically accurate and inaccurate—on which to build effective instruction. Particular attention should be paid to areas in which words that are used differently between our everyday vernacular and scientific language can create or reinforce alternative conceptions.

Anecdotal evidence from the introductory physics classrooms at Chicago State University suggests that our students view collaboration as an important tool in their learning. Despite this, students often need additional instruction and support in order for collaboration to be effective. In order to aid students in establishing effective collaborations we may be able to capitalize on the fact that students at CSU readily accept the inquiry approach to instruction. In this paper, we present the initial stage of this work. Specifically, we have begun to videotape student interactions in the classroom, interview students about the nature of learning, and develop and administer instruments that assess the value students place on the use of guided inquiry. By utilizing a specific criteria and analyzing the occurrence of specific behaviors in the classroom we can determine the effectiveness of collaboration during group work. Responses regarding how students value the use of questions in instruction indicate the ...

When presented with a question, students activate a set of knowledge, or schema, that they use to respond to the question. For many instructors, one of the goals of the introductory physics course is to help students build robust schemas of formal knowledge that are activated for a given task. In this paper, we present evidence that suggests that even when schemas of formal knowledge are formed, students often struggle to activate this knowledge. We focus on the analysis of interviews with two introductory physics students concerning the topic of dynamics. We also demonstrate that the act of explaining, during the interview, has a profound impact on the students’ responses.

This chapter draws on critical race theory and the experiences of people from marginalized groups in STEM to support the need for intersectionality in STEM education research. It also offers a critique of apolitical discipline-based STEM education research and integrated STEM education that fails to consider intersectionality. The authors identify ways in which STEM education researchers can facilitate collaboration across education equity communities and conduct research with the power to mitigate oppressive forces in STEM education and in the STEM workforce.

This study examined the mediation and moderation of membership in a demographic group underrepresented in physics classes on course outcomes measured by course grades and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) post-test scores. The study used a large dataset (N=4490) of course grades, SAT and ACT mathematics scores (ACTM), and matched FMCE pretest and post-test scores to investigate differences by gender, underrepresented ethnic or racial minority (UERM) status, and status as a first-generation college student (FGCS). For UERM and FGCS students, ACTM and pretest scores significantly mediated the relation of membership in the demographic group and both course grade and post-test score. Differences between minority and majority members of these groups were largely removed by controlling for ACTM and pretest scores. The overwhelming majority of the effect acted through ACTM for course grade (60% and 45%, respectively), while more of the effect acted through pretest score for the post-test (36% and 48%, respectively). As such, for these groups prior preparation measures predict physics outcomes (course grades or post-test scores) differently. The mediational relations for gender were dramatically different. No mediation was detected for the relation of gender to course grade because no significant difference in course grade existed. Sixty percent of the effect of gender on post-test score was not explained by either ACTM or pretest score; pretest score accounted for 38% of the effect. As such, the majority of the difference in post-test scores between men and women was not explained by either ACTM or pretest scores. Significant moderation was also detected showing that the relation of these variables was not consistent for members of all demographic groups.