Access and inclusion in instructional laboratory settings is an important topic in our modern age. Student perceptions of inclusivity are paramount for understanding access needs in classroom settings. The Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory - Student (ITSI-S) is an instrument for measuring students' perceptions of the inclusivity of various classroom practices. The instructor component, the ITSI, has been validated for STEM classrooms and for laboratory instructors and significant changes were made by our study team members in previous years. In this paper we describe our validation of the ITSI-S. Data were collected through interviews with students in laboratory courses. Then, we utilized content analysis to uncover areas where students misunderstood the question or needed further clarification. The ITSI-S could be a valuable tool to help investigate inclusivity in labs from the student perspective and could in particular give voice to disabled students.

Research in graduate education has largely been focused around admission practices and retention. Within the physics community specifically, there is less information on the rate of students receiving degrees. Motivated by understanding the connection that retention has with institutional requirements, we propose three measures utilizing survey data collected for decades by the American Institute of Physics. Utilizing these measures for the 284 graduate programs, we find that the average yearly retention of graduate students is 97%, and the percentage of first year graduate students who are awarded PhDs and Master's is 57% and 27% respectively. These measures highlight a significant difficulty in establishing a yearly measure for changes in graduate student populations, but a good starting point into the rate of students earning degrees. To further this work, we must ensure that the measures can become robust enough to be applied to individual institutions.

The perceptions that physics mentors have about disability in physics influences how they interact with their mentees, and negative biases against disability can influence students to feel discouraged within the physics community. We administered the Disability and Physics Career Survey (DPCS) through physics-specific listservs and at physics-specific conferences to measure practicing physicists' knowledge about disability and their beliefs about the viability of physics careers for individuals with a variety of disability diagnoses. This study uses Cochran's Q and McNemar's R to compare how practicing physicists' perceptions of the viability for the careers of teacher and professor depend on the impairment that an individual is diagnosed with. We find that practicing physicists view these careers as non-viable for those with cognitive impairments and hold other unconscious biases that we outline and interrogate.

Culture in departments is rooted in history; by analyzing the historic culture of physics departments, we can better understand attitudes, assumptions, and ideas that permeate contemporary culture. We examine the evolution of the idea that physics education should serve as a filter, a practice commonly called gatekeeping. Physics graduate education saw great reform throughout the 20th century that developed many of the structures that are present today. In the present, our field is more diverse than ever before, and our current standards and expectations fail to support these learners. However, this failure is seen as the student's failure rather than the system's failure. This project analyzes arguments for and against calls to expand the field through 20th-century primary sources using a concept from social dominance theory called legitimizing myths and advocates for a reconsideration of the values that justify many of the arguments for the continuation of inequitable practices.

Background In college science laboratory and discussion sections, student-centered active learning strategies have been implemented to improve student learning outcomes and experiences. Research has shown that active learning activities can increase student anxiety if students fear that they could be negatively evaluated by their peers. Error framing (i.e., to frame errors as natural and beneficial to learning) is proposed in the literature as a pedagogical tool to reduce student anxiety. However, little research empirically explores how an instructor can operationalize error framing and how error framing is perceived by undergraduate students. To bridge the gap in the literature, we conducted a two-stage study that involved science graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) and undergraduate students. In stage one, we introduced cold calling (i.e., calling on non-volunteering students) and error framing to 12 chemistry and 11 physics GTAs. Cold calling can increase student participation but may increase student anxiety. Error framing has the potential to mitigate student anxiety when paired with cold calling. GTAs were then tasked to rehearse cold calling paired with error framing in a mixed-reality classroom simulator. We identified GTA statements that aligned with the definition of error framing. In stage two, we selected a few example GTA error framing statements and interviewed 13 undergraduate students about their perception of those statements. Results In the simulator, all the GTAs rehearsed cold calling multiple times while only a few GTAs made error framing statements. A thematic analysis of GTAs’ error framing statements identified ways of error indication (i.e., explicit and implicit) and framing (i.e., natural, beneficial, and positive acknowledgement). Undergraduate student interviews revealed specific framing and tone that are perceived as increasing or decreasing student comfort in participating in classroom discourse. Both undergraduate students and some GTAs expressed negative opinions toward responses that explicitly indicate student mistakes. Undergraduate students’ perspectives also suggest that error framing should be implemented differently depending on whether errors have already occurred. Conclusion Error framing is challenging for science GTAs to implement. GTAs’ operationalizations of error framing in the simulator and undergraduate students’ perceptions contribute to defining and operationalizing error framing for instructional practice. To increase undergraduate student comfort in science classroom discourse, GTAs can use implicit error indication. In response to students’ incorrect answers, GTAs can positively frame students’ specific ideas rather than discussing broadly how errors are natural or beneficial.

In interviews with physics students and early career physicists, we ask about their experiences with having impairments in the physics setting and physics culture.In this paper, we highlight how experiences shared by participants as disabled people in physics represent clusters of models of disability.Specifically, we apply a theoretical framing of a three-dimensional disability model space, with axes defined as medical versus social (i.e., cause); tragedy versus affirmative (i.e., effect); and minority group versus universal (i.e., ability/disability dichotomy).For example, in this framework, providing accommodations is described by a cluster of the social and minority models of disability.By analyzing participants' experiences in physics through this disability framework, we aim to identify the models that underpin supportive experiences and support the development of policies and professional development for the physics community towards benefiting disabled people.Through analysis and comparison of these models and participants' narratives, we offer a discussion and possible guidelines for instructors interacting with students with disabilities, opportunities for those with disabilities to deconstruct their own prior experiences and analyze potential misinterpretations that may arise from the models. .

Despite the positive gains towards student learning outcomes and engagement, active learning has been shown to potentially increase student anxiety due to a fear of negative evaluation.A pedagogical strategy proposed to mediate this issue is known as error framing; it asks instructors to encourage a perception of errors as being a natural part of the learning process.Previous work on this project investigated how graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) operationalized error framing during their training in a mixed-reality simulator but did not investigate their usage of it in their classrooms.This analysis characterizes the error framing statements made by GTAs during a set of classroom observations.We find that GTAs who employ error framing effectively avoid statements that might decrease student comfort and instead tend towards implicit, indirect strategies.

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] All people vary in their needs and abilities; however, typical research practices do not consider these variations, which likely impacts who participates in research studies. Additionally, few PER studies have investigated aspects of disability or reported disability identity. Combined, this means that PER researchers typically do not seek out the experiences of disabled people and disabled people might not have access to participate in research studies. In this paper, we demonstrate how a research team can use principles from Universal Design for Learning and the Variation Planning Tool to anticipate expectations of ability and create flexible options in a qualitative research study. We then demonstrate how different interview structures can impact disabled participants through a case study with three participants, all of whom self-identified as students with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. Finally, we conclude with implications and suggestions for researchers in planning their study designs. It is critical that, as physics education researchers, we anticipate, welcome, and support disabled participants in our research, particularly as interviews are a prevalent method in the field. Through the example presented in this paper, we hope to encourage researchers to examine their own methods through the lens of accessibility and to offer alternative formats in their research design as a means to combat ableism and to provide access to all research participants.

As physics graduate programs adapt to an ever-changing world, it is important to update their practices of assessing students.We are interested in the variety of ways that physics graduate students' comprehension and progress are evaluated.We conducted a landscape study of university handbooks and websites documenting the ways in which students are assessed throughout their program.These practices were compared among departments to determine how diverse department assessments are.We also compared our findings with recommendations from "Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century" determined by a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.This work will help to better understand what the numerous institutions across the country consider as necessary practices and requirements for graduate students.Understanding this landscape can provide a resource for graduate programs looking to update their practices and a foundation for further investigations into graduate education within physics programs.

Students with disabilities involved in postsecondary physics education may benefit from research opportunities and mentorship.However, the literature documenting supports provided by physics mentors to disabled students is limited.In this study, we analyze interviews with five mentors who either instruct physics courses or lead a research group for examples of how they support disabled students doing research or seeking career advice.Furthermore, we contextualize the examples of supports using six models of disability.Models include the cause of disability (medical/social), the effect of impairment on well-being (tragedy/affirmative), and the dichotomy of dis/ability (minority/universal).We find mentors discuss supports provided to disabled students in research settings that align with clusters of models of disability.While there is not one set of models that yields a one-size-fits-all solution, the universal model plus social model cluster can help mentors design useful and durable supports.

Physics graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are tasked with multifaceted teaching assignments, such as leading tutorials and inquiry-based laboratories, yet their professional development rarely includes opportunities to rehearse complex pedagogical skills or receive feedback on their teaching. In this study, physics GTAs practiced specific pedagogical skills during four sessions in a mixed-reality classroom simulator; here, we focus on GTAs' use of a specific questioning strategy called "Stretch-It." GTAs can apply Stretch-It by asking students to explain their logic (Explain Logic), either by explaining their work or providing evidence for their claim; or by asking students to take the content further (Follow-Up), either by applying it in an analogous situation or answering the initial question in another way. We found GTAs used all four types of Stretch-It subcategories during simulator sessions that incorporated facilitator feedback about their use of questioning. We also compared the use of Stretch-It questioning in the classroom for a pretraining semester cohort and the high-intensity simulator training cohort and found that the high intensity cohort's average use of Explain Logic questions in the observation immediately following the Stretch-It rehearsal was meaningfully higher than the pretraining cohort's average use of Explain Logic. However, the high-intensity cohort's use of Explain Logic is unstable, and values fall back within the pretraining average in subsequent classroom observations. We did not find a significant difference between the cohorts' use of Follow-Up. We discuss the implications of our findings for science, technology, engineering, and medicine GTA professional development and the significance of providing feedback to GTAs about their teaching.

Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking (Next Gen PET) is a research-based, activelearning physical science curriculum for general education physics courses, with a focus on pre-service and inservice elementary school teachers.During pre-COVID introduction of this curricula at higher-education institutions across the country, instructors implementing the curriculum were recruited to participate in faculty online learning communities (FOLCs).In this project, we conduct a secondary analysis on transcriptions of recorded FOLC meetings through Revealed Causal Mapping (RCM), a qualitative technique to create causal maps composed of interconnected causal statements.This method allows us to examine instructors' decisionmaking while implementing the Next Gen PET curriculum.In this paper, we share insights about how instructors decide to form groups, specifically group composition and frequency of group changes.We found that instructors may have their own preconceived ideas about the best ways to form groups, sometimes contrary to what current research suggests.

Disability is an often-overlooked aspect of diversity. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 15% of the world's population identifies as disabled, yet there is a dearth of knowledge and literature about supporting disabled learners in postsecondary physics courses. The goal of this chapter is to synthesize and critique the extant literature about how instructors can teach physics courses in ways to support disabled leaners. Through a systematic literature review, 66 sources were identified which discuss physics, teaching, and disability. In the extant literature, 51 sources are written for practitioners and 15 sources contain novel research. Overall, the literature includes suggestions and solutions to respond to access needs and begins to explore experiences of disabled students and the role of instructors and higher education administrators in supporting the variety of students' needs, abilities, and interests. Findings and implications are disaggregated by suggestions for practice and for education researchers.

Postsecondary STEM instruction often does not meet the diverse needs, abilities, and interests of postsecondary STEM learners. The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework provides ideas for designing instructional environments to support learner variation. However, existing tools do not meet the professional development needs of many postsecondary STEM instructors, or the research needs of some discipline-based education researchers. Enacting and assessing UDL in postsecondary STEM requires expertise form three stakeholder groups: postsecondary STEM instructors, experts in disability and UDL, and discipline-based education researchers. Building on prior work with UDL in postsecondary STEM, our multi-disciplinary team developed the Universal Design for Learning Instructional Practice Observation Protocol (UDL-IPOP). The UDL-IPOP has one-to-one alignment with the finest-grain descriptors (i.e., checkpoints) in the UDL framework as well as exemplar practices to explicate UDL-aligned instructional practices for postsecondary STEM. After drafting an initial version of the UDL-IPOP, we discussed it with representatives from the three relevant stakeholder groups. Here, we describe practices that aligned with the UDL framework. Then, we discuss initial impressions about which practices postsecondary STEM instructors likely already implement and ideas from disability experts about how STEM instructors could deepen their UDL practice. Overall, we find that postsecondary STEM instructors and disability experts focused on different types of learner variation. We suggest that collaborating with disability experts could provide a necessary "lens change" to better support variation in postsecondary STEM learners' needs, abilities, and interests.

To improve accessibility and inclusion in postsecondary STEM education, we propose implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) based practices to meet the needs of a variety of learners. The UDL is a design framework aimed at improving and optimizing teaching and learning for all people, regardless of their disability status. As part of a larger professional development project, interviews were conducted with members of a faculty learning community to discuss their instructional practices and to offer feedback regarding opportunities to remove barriers to access and participation. In this paper, we focus on an interview with a physics instructor and examine their beliefs about students with disabilities as evidenced by the disability-specific language used in the interview. This prompted a new perspective on professional development regarding accommodating students with disabilities that focuses on confronting ablest beliefs as a crucial component in promoting inclusion in STEM education.

We draw on methods from lines-of-argument analysis in Critical Interpretive Synthesis to synthesize and critique pathways through which disabled students access supports in postsecondary STEM. Integrating recent literature about pathways to access in postsecondary education as well as our ongoing research, we describe various mechanisms through which disabled students are currently provided (or not provided) access in postsecondary STEM and identify strengths and weaknesses with these various pathways. Specifically, we describe and problematize the typical accommodations process, which requires students to register with a Disability Resource Center which then negotiates accommodations with the disabled student and their instructors. Next, we describe alternatives to the traditional accommodations model, such as normalizing discussion of access needs (a tenant of disability justice), allowing individual instructors to validate students' needs and appropriate accommodations, and access through interdependence (another tenant of disability justice). We describe dimensions along which these pathways vary, such as process, disclosure, requirements for validity, and burden. We suggest instructors and mentors pull from all these models to create a transparent ecosystem of supports.

Disability is an often-overlooked aspect of diversity.Recent research has indicated that there are barriers to access and participation for disabled students inherent in the design of physics courses.To help counteract these barriers, universities are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabled students.However, not all students use the accommodations they have access to because of social factors (e.g., disability stigma), and others do not have access to the professional diagnosis often required to access accommodations.The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of students who identify with a disability/impairment who were taking an emergency remote teaching (ERT) physics course in Fall 2020 to inform policies about providing access to students in future remote and face-to-face courses.In this paper, we present the prevalence and types of impairments disabled students in physics courses reported, their reported accommodation usage, and ethical considerations of this work.Overall, we find that disabled students represent a sizeable group in physics courses, and there are positive and negative reasons students did not use or request accommodations.

Physics mentors play an important role in supporting students in postsecondary education and in their transition to graduate school and careers.The knowledge and beliefs physics mentors have about disability can affect how they mentor students with disabilities.We administered the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS) to 237 practicing physicists recruited through physics-specific listservs to measure their knowledge about disability and beliefs about the viability of physics careers for people with different disability diagnoses.This study compares practicing physicists' varied knowledge about different categories of impairments and diagnoses, and their beliefs about the viability of future careers for students with specific impairments.We present our findings examining the knowledge of practicing physicists about disability, their beliefs about the viability of certain physics careers for people with disabilities, and how those beliefs may vary depending on their personal disability experience.

In this paper, we present a case study with a disabled physics student to draw attention to his experiences in the physics community, and the barriers and supports that he experienced as he advanced through his physics career. Using a methodology of narrative analysis, we identify themes and genres within the stories told by the participant. Narratives are often created to explain the unexpected and to solve a problem. In the physics community, disabled students find their "differences" (i.e., disability/impairments) are often positioned as unexpected and a problem to be solved. We use narrative analysis to humanize disabled physics students and to highlight their lived experiences of progressing through the physics community over their perceived deviation from the physics "norm." From this, we create resources for physics mentors to increase their knowledge of disabled physics students' experiences and how to support accessibility and inclusion in the physics community.

Background While there have been numerous calls to increase the participation of people with disabilities in STEM, many postsecondary institutions are not equipped to support students with disabilities. We examined the accessibility of 139 webpages from 73 postsecondary institutions in the USA that contained information about the undergraduate physics curriculum and graduate research programs. We selected these webpages as they are common entry points for students interested in pursuing a physics degree. We used Tenon and Mac OS X’s VoiceOver software to assess the level of accessibility of these webpages as measured by alignment with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Results We found that only one webpage had minimal accessibility errors (i.e., 10 errors), while the other webpages had numerous accessibility errors. Five specific error types accounted for the majority of all errors. The five most common errors were related to information, structure, and relationships of content (1.3.1 Level A; 39.7%); text alternatives for non-text content (1.1.1 Level A; 27.0%); information about link purpose (2.4.4 Level A; 14.7%); capability to resize text (1.4.4 Level AA; 10.0%); and information about the name, role, and value of user interface components (4.1.2 Level A; 11.2%). Conclusions We present and describe the five common accessibility errors we identified in the webpages in our sample, suggest solutions for these errors, and provide implications for students with disabilities, instructors and staff, institutional administration, and the broader physics community.