Development of STEM professionals when integrating education research and physics public engagement into their careers

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of PhysicsEleanor C SayreTo broaden participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education and continue building research capacity, this dissertation focuses on STEM professionals: those who take up education research later in their career and those who facilitate engagement in physics learning outside the formal classroom. Using agency, identity and motivation frameworks combined with qualitative research methodologies, we report on three projects that investigate how scientists integrate new research areas in their careers and engage with the public in order to gain a deeper understanding of their professional development needs. First, through a multiple case study analysis of three participants in a professional development program, we use Bandura’s theoretical framework on agency to investigate how program activities affect emerging STEM education researchers’ agency. Our analysis illustrates a mechanism by which professional development opportunities worked in favor of increasing self-efficacy and echoed more broadly into agency. Our study highlights the importance of agency when creating professional development activities to increase and sustain engagement in discipline-based education research (DBER) in different institutional contexts. Second, we use phenomenography grounded in Holland’s figured worlds to identify the spectrum of ways emerging STEM education researchers identify or imagine themselves in DBER. We characterize three ways they conceptualize education research: to improve teaching, to join a new field of research or to negotiate their position and identity in DBER vis-a-vis their home discipline. The nuanced experiences of these emerging STEM education researchers bring to the surface the challenges and opportunities of emerging STEM education researchers. Their experiences illustrate the need for a variety of professional development support including but not limited to nuanced and explicit discussions of the norms and culture of DBER within disciplinary science departments and discussions about DBER across STEM disciplines. Third, we use personas methodology and Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory to articulate the motivation, challenges, and needs in public engagement of physicists with a range of different experiences. We discuss our personas refinement process, our set of personas and implications for the development of user-centered resources for the informal physics community. Our personas consist of the physicist who engages in informal physics for self-reflection, the physicist who wants to spark interest and understanding of physics and the physicist who wants to provide diverse role models to younger students and inspire them to pursue STEM careers. Needs covered a range of resources including science communication training, community building among informal physics practitioners and mechanisms to recognize, elevate and value informal physics. Using personas not only expands our understanding of motivations and needs of practitioners in physics public engagement, it brings user-centered design methodology to a new topical area of physics education research

Informal physics with the Middle Eastern and North African region and public

Physics, as a human venture, seeks to engage people all across the world. Engagement encompasses a variety of activities through which to interact with the public, including students and early-career physicists. In the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region, the landscape of the type of activities is relatively under-explored, and the exploration of these activities vis-à-vis different groups remains an area of interest within the literature. The public engagement activities that we present in this talk cover the authors’ experiences in three key activities: talks, mentorship, and social media engagement, all of which aim to address a MENA audience. The purpose of these activities is to spark interest in physics, gauge existing interest, engage in discussions about the impact of physics research locally and globally, and provide information about physics careers. Engagement comes in various forms — for instance, talks at Egyptian universities consisted of informal teaching events which engaged diverse audiences, including early-career physicists and the general public. Our online engagement has centered around mentorship of physics students and early-career physicists. Through the informality of social media, we have been able to engage with MENA students, both within the MENA region and within the diaspora in the context of research and early-stage career advice. The increasing influence of social media over the past decade has given rise to this new modality for engagement, which includes two types: public mentorship by raising awareness about physics and its applications and professional mentorship to provide information to early career physicists. In the context of the broader literature, informal physics programs play a critical role in recruitment of under-represented populations into physics and their sense of belonging to the physics community (Rethman et al., 2021). Our work highlights the impact of these engagement activities with a novel audience that has not been represented in the physics education literature. Understanding how different members of the public respond to public engagement will be important for developing future strategies and programs dedicated to improving STEM engagement efforts in the MENA region. Our goal is to advocate for public engagement in the MENA world and to encourage more research in informal physics in the Arab region. We plan to present examples and discuss our experiences in talks, mentorship, and social media engagement with a MENA audience. REFERENCE Rethman, C., Perry, J., Donaldson, J. P., Choi, D., & Erukhimova, T. (2021). Impact of informal physics programs on university student development: Creating a physicist. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 17(2), 020110

Emerging Physics Education Researchers' Growth in Professional Agency: Case Study

Improving the physics enterprise to broaden participation in physics is one of the main goals of the physics education research community. Many classically trained physics faculty transition during their faculty career into engaging in research investigating the teaching and learning of their discipline. There is scarce research on the support and needs of these faculty as they engage in their first projects in this new research field for them. We investigate agency growth of two emerging physics education researchers and one emerging mathematics education researcher as they participate in a professional development program. We ground our case study analysis of interview data in a theoretical framework on agency. We identify the elements of the professional development program that were transformative in our case study participants' trajectory in education research. Receiving get-started information, building mechanisms to sustain research projects and engaging with a supportive community help participants transform general interests to specific questions, articulate concrete next-steps and increase their sense of self-efficacy. During this professional development program all three case study participants gain agency in this new area of research for them. These identified program elements that affect agency growth can inform professional development opportunities for faculty transitioning into discipline-based education research, which expands our understanding of how to build capacity in the field.Comment: Submitted to PhysRevPE

Motivation and needs of informal physics practitioners

Physicists engage with the public to varying degrees at different stages of their careers. However, their public engagement covers many activities, events, and audiences, making their motivations and professional development needs not well understood. As part of ongoing efforts to build and support community in the informal physics space, we conducted interviews with physicists with a range of different experiences in public engagement. We use personas methodology and self-determination theory to articulate their public engagement motivation, challenges, and needs. We present our set of three personas: the physicist who engages in informal physics for self-reflection, the physicist who wants to spark interest and understanding in physics, and the physicist who wants to provide diverse role models to younger students and inspire them to pursue a STEM career. Needs covered a range of resources including science communication training, community building among informal physics practitioners, and mechanisms to recognize, elevate and value informal physics. By bringing user-centered design methodology to a new topical area of physics education research, we expand our understanding of motivations and needs of practitioners in physics public engagement. Therefore, departments, organizations and institutions could draw upon the personas developed to consider the ways to better support physicists in their respective environment.Comment: 9 pages; preliminary portions of some of this analysis appeared in PERC 2022; submitted to PhysRevPE

Community Roles for Supporting Emerging Education Researchers

DBER attracts many faculty from other STEM disciplines, and these faculty have little or no specific training in DBER. DBER requires a mastery of quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methodologies, and also a nuanced understanding of breadth of topic, research questions, and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinarity is particularly challenging for emerging DBER researchers who often switch into DBER with only discipline specific content and research training. As part of a large study about how STEM faculty become involved with DBER, we interviewed a number of emerging DBER faculty about their pathways into DBER. We conducted a thematic analysis of these interviews grounded in the theoretical frameworks of the reasoned action approach and conjecture mapping. Based on our analysis we identified 3 roles that support new faculty entering DBER. These roles are the peer, the subject matter expert, and the project manager