Increase the number of students from underrepresented groups in physics

At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a young woman of color – a first-year physics student – made an appointment with Mary James, the college's dean of institutional diversity. "She said, 'I heard there was an African-American physicist on campus, and I just wanted to meet you,'" James says. In her interview, the student recalled standing at Blackboard the previous week to work on a problem and suddenly realizing that all of her group partners were white men. She thought if she failed, they would think women of color couldn't hack it. "She said, 'I knew I shouldn't think that. But I could not help." It was a classic stereotype threat," says James, who handed the student a book from her bookshelf about the phenomenon. "This is a really powerful thing, and it really hampers performance."

James, who now chairs a diversity task force at the American Institute of Physics (AIP), is a member of a small club. She was one of only 66 black women to earn doctorates in physics at U.S. universities from 1973 to 2012, compared with more than 22.000 white males and more than 2.400 white women.

Diversity is an issue in all sciences, but in the United States, physics (along with math and engineering) is at the bottom of the pile. The National Science Foundation reported 1 that in 2014, people from underrepresented groups (blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians or Alaska Native groups) earned about 20% of the bachelor's degrees in science and engineering awarded in the United States. The AIP also drilled into the numbers and found that although underrepresented minority (URM) people make up about one-third of the U.S. population, they receive only 11% of physics bachelor's degrees and 7% of PhDs (that's a meager 60-70 students per year). The percentage of faculty members who are African American actually declined slightly from 2008 to 2012. Although women earn slightly more than half of bachelor's and doctoral degrees in science in the United States, they receive only 20% of physics degrees (down from a high of 23% in 2004).

The reasons for these disparities are many, and leaks occur at every stage of the educational pipeline from elementary school onward. URM populations, for example, are more likely to be economically disadvantaged, leading to poor access to good education and a resulting lack of opportunity.

The lack of role models is also a big problem, says Jami Valentine, a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and an advocate for African-American women in physics. "Too many professors have never taught an African American in a graduate course, and they've probably never had a colleague who was African American," says Valentine, a former board member of the National Society of Black Physicists. 'Students need to see physicists who look like them'."

James' task force at AIP convened in December 2017 and will focus specifically on African Americans in physics. The choice of target is strategic because it highlights a tremendous lack of progress: A smaller share of bachelor's degrees in physics and astronomy are awarded to African Americans today than two decades ago. Over the next two years, the task force will survey students and visit schools to find best practices and develop recommendations to increase the representation of African Americans in these disciplines.

But everyone acknowledges that work is needed across the board to close the gaps for all URM students at all levels of education. "We need to focus on all areas," says Ximena Cid, a physicist at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who publishes on diversity issues in physics. "At every level, we lose people."

High inclusivity

A wall at Manor New Tech High School in Texas features a mural painted by students. In cool shades of blue and gray, it shows the unformed shapes of a boy and girl entering a chemical apparatus and bubbling out the other end of the pipeline. When the school opened on the outskirts of Austin in 2007, Principal Steve Zipkes told researchers at George Washington University that "it was all about getting our kids to go to college". Of the district's students – 79% of whom are economically disadvantaged and 24% of whom are African American – only 40% graduated from high school and only 15% went on to college. By 2010, Manor New Tech sent more than half of its students to four-year postsecondary institutions, compared to a national average of 28%.

Sharon Lynch, science educator at George Washington University, considers the new technology an example of an inclusive STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) school. Lynch and her team are beginning to show that such schools are having great success in ensuring that URM students get the education they need to set them up for science in college.

In the United States, Lynch says, URM populations typically face a double whammy. "Poor kids who live in poor neighborhoods are really underserved by school funding," she says. For example, nearly one in five African American students attend a school that does not offer Advanced Placement courses. But even in schools that do, Lynch says, URM students are more likely to be enrolled in courses that are less academically challenging than middle-class white kids.

"For minority kids, access is not enough," Lynch says. If a poor black girl with an interest in STEM attends a good school, Theoretically, she has access to top-stream classes, but in reality, Lynch says, That access is hard to come by. "You could go into any high school near me and accurately determine the level of a course based on the percentage of brown and black students in a classroom," she says. "The only high schools where I have seen this practice completely dismantled are the inclusive STEM high schools."

Unlike science-oriented schools that aim to attract high achievers, inclusive STEM schools admit students based on interest, not test scores. They are public schools, often with no special admissions criteria, and some even use a lottery system. Their mandate is to give all their students college preparatory work, rather than just some of them. "These schools don't just provide access, they make sure you have that experience," Lynch says.

The schools are emphasizing many of the things that education researchers advocate for all groups, all ages and all fields of study. For example, there is a lot of problem-based learning and a strong sense of community, and they integrate new technologies into everyday activities. Lynch's team participated in a chemistry class at Manor New Tech in which students designed a gas canister for use in a biodome on the moon. Less than 15% of class time was spent on teacher instruction, and some of it was specifically requested by students.

In 2012, Lynch and her colleagues began studying eight high-performing inclusive STEM schools to understand why they are so successful. Her co-investigator Barbara Means of SRI International, a nonprofit research organization based in Menlo Park, California, crunched the numbers for about 50 inclusive STEM schools in North Carolina and Texas.

The study found that these schools are clearly meeting their 'inclusive' mission. For example, half of the high school graduates at North Carolina schools were African American, compared with only 9% in the class of 2013 at the selective North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. In both North Carolina and Texas, most students came from low-income households – a proportion that exceeds or equals the averages in those states.

Students who attended these inclusive STEM schools graduated with stronger attitudes toward science and more career interest than average public school students. Lynch cites a longitudinal study that tracked students in STEM schools two years after graduation, "African Americans, Latinos, and girls perform better on many measures than their peers in comprehensive high schools," she says. "More kids are going to college and more kids are staying in college."

Even in schools that don't focus specifically on STEM, physics teachers have access to a variety of approaches to make them more inclusive, many of which improve test scores and attitudes, especially among URM students.

Don't give up

Eugenia Etkina grew up in Moscow, where she trained as a physics teacher. She moved to the U.S. in 1995 and now conducts research in physics education at Rutgers Graduate School of Education in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the 1990s, she saw that most high school and undergraduate physics classes were taught using the 'predict, observe, explain' model. That may sound like a reasonable way to learn physics, but Etkina argues that it hurts women and URM students.

Most of the time, Etkina explains, physics predictions based on intuition are wrong. If a teacher asks what falls the fastest, something heavy or something light, for example, most people would say something 'heavy,' based on everyday experiences with rocks versus leaves, say. When the teacher whips out two equally weighted balls and proves you wrong, it seems to be a trick. The intended effect is to surprise the student, make them curious, and solve a mystery. Why are these balls falling at the same rate? Is it really exactly the same speed? And at what point does air friction make a difference? Instead, students often feel threatened and defensive. "Then they think, 'I'm stupid – I don't belong here,'" Etkina says.

Groups that already tend to think they don't fit in because of their minority status or various cultural factors are hit hardest by such blows. URM people have been shown to face stigma and stereotypes that can affect their confidence3 and performance in science classes, for example, and women tend to judge themselves more harshly than men4. "As a woman, I realized what I was putting my students through," Etkina says.

Etkina devoted himself to developing some alternative teaching philosophies to circumvent this problem specifically for physics, and developed the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE). In this system, she explains, students have the opportunity to observe a phenomenon before they make testable observations. "We call them 'crazy ideas,' so it's fun to rule them out," she adds. Perhaps, for example, the speed at which an object falls depends on whether it is made of stone or rubber. This fosters a 'high-failure' environment where fear of failure is reduced.

Etkina says that more than 1.000 teachers have used the ISLE approach in their high school and undergraduate physics classes, with a textbook and materials developed to support the approach. Suzanne White Brahmia, a physics education researcher at the University of Washington, integrated ISLE into her first-year physics course5 at Rutgers University in 2001 and credits it in part for a major shift in the demographics of her students. The percentage of URM students who graduated with a STEM degree in less than six years increased from 8% in the late 1980s to 58% in 2008.

Geraldine Cochran, who studies physics education and teaches at Rutgers University, began using ISLE in 2017. It has many good features, she says, including "creating a culture where it's OK to make mistakes and to emphasize strengths instead of weaknesses."

The ISLE approach is just one of many teaching innovations in STEM that have had a disproportionately positive impact on women and URM students. Another of these, the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-Down Pedagogy (SCALE-UP), was developed in the physics department at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh. This approach requires students to watch lectures or read books before coming to class so that class time can be spent on discussion and problem solving. Teachers who use SCALE-UP report that their students are more comfortable with the idea of not understanding something at first glance. They tend to feel less isolated and less likely to think they are alone if they don't get it. This in turn reduces failure rates, especially for URM students. In a study of more than 16.000 students who took introductory physics courses at NCSU over a five-year period, students in a more conventional lecture class were about 2.8 times more likely to fail tests than SCALE-UP students. This percentage shifted to 4.7 for women and 3.5 for African Americans.

Assessing the effectiveness of such programs is difficult, however, because they are confounded by other variables, including social trends. There are established methods for assessing whether changes to basic education improve student understanding, including simple things like class size or course content, But even these are subject to bias. According to Cid, 63% of college students represented in the U.S. physics research literature are white, compared to 45% of all college students. This imbalance stems from the fact that most studies are conducted at selective, top-tier research universities with fewer URM students. "Effectively, the physics research community has inadvertently cherry-picked its data," Cid wrote in a 2017 paper6. They have created an accidental focus on "well-prepared calculus-based students with relatively homogeneous and privileged backgrounds"."

Top Tier

If students can be attracted to university physics and stay long enough to graduate, the final educational hurdle is getting them into graduate work. The American Physical Society's Bridge Program aims to do just that by working with more than 35 U.S. institutions to improve admission and retention rates for URM students in physics degree programs.

One of the main effects of the Bridge program is to counteract biases introduced by the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), a standardized test required for admission to most graduate schools in the United States. A survey of about 150 U.S. physics graduate programs (out of about 200 in the U.S.) found that more than one-third use GRE scores to make admissions decisions. However, research has shown that GRE scores are not related to PhD success. However, they correlate strongly with race and gender7.

The result of using GRE scores as cut-offs, argues Casey Miller, associate dean for research and faculty affairs at Rochester Institute of Technology, is "a glass ceiling erected by the lopsided treatment of minorities and women before they even set foot in graduate school."

Bridge programs encourage universities to consider other qualities such as a candidate's dedication to the subject, motivation to work hard, creativity, persistence, and drive. They also provide mentoring for students once they are in graduate school, along with financial support. Since its inception in 2012, the APS Bridge program has helped 129 students enroll in PhDs. If all of these students graduate, the percentage of PhDs awarded to URM students in the U.S. doubles. Individual universities see similar increases. Ohio State University, for example, made a conscious effort to increase diversity in its physics PhD program, in part through a bridge program. URM students increased from less than 5% of domestic students in 2012 to nearly 20% in 2017.

The impact of such programs can also be self-reinforcing. Just as a lack of role models tends to undermine URM students' retention in physics, your presence can have a disproportionate impact. Making role models more available and visible is an important part of the National Society of Black Physicists' work, Valentine says. The organization hosts an annual conference, in part to reinforce the sense that it's normal for African Americans to do physics, and also to make connections for mentorships. The upcoming conference, to be held this November in Columbus, Ohio, is expected to bring together more than 500 African American students and professionals.

Many programs aim to target funding and efforts specifically to URM populations, but others are simply about changing the way physics is taught to make it more inclusive from the start – not only to include all races and genders, but also all learning styles and a more diverse range of talents. Students shouldn't think, "I don't belong here," James says, "even though they'll probably overhear that in the cafeteria". Programs that reduce fear of speaking, promote teamwork and self-satisfaction, and break down stereotypes will help all of science.