Tools for Physicists: A New Majors Seminar Course

Sara Callori
California State University, San Bernardino

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This blog post is part of a special series arising from the June 2024 Education Special Session at AAS 244, Towards Equity in the Classroom: Implementing Progressive Pedagogical Practices. This session and this blog series highlight progressive pedagogical teaching practices that break from traditional lecture classroom techniques to increase student engagement, learning, and belonging across diverse groups of students. Read previous entries in this series here and here.

Retention among physics and astronomy undergraduate majors is an ongoing problem for many departments across the country. As discussed in the Phys21 Report (Preparing Physics Students for 21st Century Careers) and the recent Attrition and Persistence in Undergraduate Physics Programs AIP report, only about 30% of students, who begin their undergraduate careers interested in physics, graduate with a physics degree. Our field’s retention problem is magnified when we focus on students from groups historically underrepresented and marginalized in STEM. This is the exact context faced at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). Our student population, primarily undergraduate students, is roughly 80% first-generation students, about 75% students of color, and 55% of our undergraduate student population receive Pell Grants^[1].  

As CSUSB prepared for a move from the quarter system to the semester system in Fall 2020, the Physics Department, led by the work of Drs. Carol Hood, Sara Callori, and Laura Woodney, created a new seminar course to help address the physics major attrition problem and was inspired by recommendations in the Phys21 report. An investigation into the retention of physics majors at CSUSB discovered that the largest attrition rate occurred when students were working through their math prerequisite courses before starting their physics courses. Therefore, in designing the new course, no particular prerequisite math knowledge was needed to be successful in the course. The goals of this new course — Tools for Physicists — are to provide academic advising and introductory career guidance, to set the stage for building fundamental skills and foundational knowledge, and to create a sense of belonging amongst physics students early in their undergraduate careers. The emphasis on community building and strengthening students’ STEM self-efficacy^[2] through the coursework has, on average, increased our retention and persistence rates in the major. 

The course is an introduction to tools and techniques necessary to prepare students for the physics curriculum with topics including problem-solving techniques, basic programming, data analysis, and discussions of careers and research in physics. These are sorted into four Course Threads (also see Figure 1): 

1. Career Preparation (roughly 30% of the course content with activities such as preparing Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) application materials and exploring physics career paths)
2. Science Preparation (roughly 30% of the course content with activities such as Problems of the Week, Python Learning Modules, and a “Bite-based”^[3] Journal Club)
3. Physics in Society (roughly 25% of the course content utilizing The Underrepresentation Curriculum)
4. Community (roughly 15% of the course content with activities such as creating and adhering to Community Norms, and peer review)

Career and Science Preparation threads are each roughly 30% of the overall course content. Career Preparation includes activities and assignments to explore what jobs are available to physicists with bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and doctorates, help students prepare applications for REUs, and provide academic advising and course planning. In the Science Preparation thread, the Problems of the Week focuses on problem-solving methodologies as opposed to problems with physics-specific content. For example, a favorite amongst both students and faculty is having pairs use nothing but their brains, paper, and a pencil, to answer the questions, “How much toilet paper does the US use in a year? How much area would that cover?”. It’s quite an entertaining way to improve estimation skills, discuss orders of magnitude, and foster cohort building! The Physics in Society thread utilizes the Underrepresentation Curriculum (URC), a free modular curriculum created for and by undergraduate and high school STEM instructors to teach about injustice and change STEM culture. The three units of the URC used in this course are (1) the nature of science, who does and does not do science, (2) social topics specifically relevant to folks from historically underrepresented groups (e.g., meritocracy and intersectionality), and (3) learning how to take action. 

With the course being in just its 5th iteration, we have already seen positive impacts on the department’s physics major retention rate. Over the past four years, we have retained all transfer students, and have greatly decreased the drop-out rate for first-time freshman physics majors. Comparing the URC pre- and post-anonymous survey results across the five iterations sheds further light on the success of the course. We were able to match 32 pre and post surveys, based on a code created and known only by the student. By the end of the course, they felt they could be themselves in the class (a 15-point growth to 84%), that it is important to discuss racism in a physics class to help work through and solve society’s problems (a 16-point increase to 88%), and that they each have a responsibility to promote diversity in physics (a 7% increase to 91%). Their belief that physics is objective dropped slightly over the course! At the top of the term, the average rating of physics being purely objective to being purely subjective was 73% objective. At the close of the term, this average dropped to 65%. The movement toward more socially conscious student scientists is encouraging! 

If creating a brand-new major requirement course is not possible within your institution, there are ways to bring some of what we’ve done into your classrooms/group. Consider experimenting with combining skill and knowledge building with cohort development as this helps create a sense of belonging. Data and research suggest that a sense of belonging and identity directly supports retention and graduation rates^[4]. The URC is modular! You can pull one or two activities or modules from it to bring societal topics into your classes. Also, we’re happy to share resources — please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

Notes

^[1]  Federal grants are generally awarded to students with “exceptional financial need”. (https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/grants/pell) 

^[2] For a great article on Self-efficacy in active learning-based courses see Kutchyna et al 2021. 

^[3] Students pick a recent entry from a graduate student-led “bites” blog site such as Astrobites, Chembites, Particlebites, PERbites, Softbites, and Qubytes.

^[4] Check out the TEAM-UP The Time Is Now Report for more information!