Archive: Spring 2018 Awards
Spring 2018 Awards
Strand: Duncan McBride PER Conference Award
Rica Sirbaugh French (MiraCosta College), Developing Fluency: A Framework for Generating Effective Representations and Tasks
Funding to attend 2018 Summer AAPT meeting and PERC and present work
Strand: Organizer
Project: Processing the 2018 POC Discussion Session with an Expert Facilitator
Geraldine L. Cochran, Assistant Professor; Alexis Knaub, Consultant
Discussion sessions around important issues, such as race, can be powerful and bring up matters that would benefit from deeper reflection. After PERC 2018's People of Color Discussion session, session participants will be invited to a gathering with a facilitator who will help us process the discussion. To honor the expertise and time of this facilitator, this proposal seeks funding to provide an honorarium.
Project: Improving Accessibility for Physics Students with Visual or Cognitive Disabilities:
Honorarium for an Invited Speaker
Dimitri Dounas-Frazer, Senior Research Associate
At the 2018 AAPT Summer Meeting, the Committee on Laboratories and the Committee on Diversity in Physics will co-sponsor an invited session called "Improving Accessibility for Physics Students with Visual or Cognitive Disabilities." This proposal seeks an honorarium for Daniel Gillen, an invited speaker in the "Improving Accessibility" session who will present about his experiences as a blind physics student.
Project: Support for books for PERC 2018 Duckworth book club
Amy Robertson, Leslie Atkins Elliott, Andrew Elby, and Jennifer Richards
The Committee on Diversity in Physics and the Committee on International Physics The theme of the 2018 Physics Education Research Conference is "Having
Wonderful Ideas: Connecting the Content, Outcomes, and Pedagogies of Physics." The title of the conference was inspired by Eleanor Duckworth's book, "The Having of Wonderful Ideas." There, she writes, "The having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development. And I consider it the essence of pedagogy to give [students] the occasion to have [their] wonderful ideas and to let [them] feel good about [them]sel[ves] for having them." One of the parallel sessions at the 2018 PERC will be a book club centered on Duckworth's book. The requested funds will defray the cost of the book for up to 15 parallel session participants.
Project: The Impact of Policy and Access to Higher Education in STEM Fields
Ximena Cid, Assistant Professor
This proposal is intended to secure travel funding for invited speakers to attend the Winter 2019 AAPT conference in Houston, TX. The Committee on Diversity has decided to host a session on how policy influences students' choices or access to higher education with an emphasis on Physics and STEM fields. The three speakers that have been invited are not part of our AAPT/PER community yet have extensive knowledge on STEM fields as well as policies that affect marginalized groups as well as gaining access to spaces in higher education. The purpose of this proposal is to support travel for these three scholars.
Strand: Innovation and Community Resources
Project: How STEM students conceptualize stakeholders in sociotechnical
development and potential harm resulting from science and technology applications in society
Ayush Gupta, Assistant Research Professor; Chandra Turpen, Assistant Research Professor; Alexis Papak, Student
In this project, the PIs will leverage audiovideo data to build knowledge on how students engage the social and ethical dimensions of technology implementation. Specifically, they will produce a peer reviewed manuscript on how engineering students discursively construct various stakeholders in the context of Target's use of predictive analytics to aggressively advertise to pregnant women. Preliminary analysis strongly supports that students need a lot of structured scaffolding to conceptualize harm resulting from technology, especially when the stakeholders are across lines of power and privilege. The results inform heuristics for the design of learning environments that focus on learning about the ethical and social dimensions of STEM.
Project: The Polaris Documentation Project: A Proposal to Fund the Documentation of a Graduate-Undergraduate Mentorship Program
Noah S Charles, Advisor: Ilya A Gruzberg; Humberto Gilmer, Advisor: Linda Carpenter; Mike A Lopez, Advisor: Andrew Heckler
In Fall of 2017, physics graduate and undergraduate students at The Ohio State University coordinated to found a gradundergrad mentorship program for underrepresented students, Polaris. Polaris is a member of the Access Network, a multi-university group of programs dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusivity in STEM. Students who find themselves isolated early in their careers are less likely to complete their bachelors degrees; the mentorship program is designed to target students at critical junctures in the curriculum to aid retention. We believe many aspects of this program would be replicable across disciplines and locations, and propose to hire an undergraduate fellow to document and comment upon our progress during the 2018-19 school year. The fellow would receive a stipend, and the grant would also fund a presentation of her work at the Physics Education Research Conference in Summer 2019.
