Funder: Inclusive Graduate Education Network

Description:  To fully understand the academic experiences of students from marginalized groups it is crucial to focus on the capital these groups use to overcome challenges. The Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework values resources Communities of Color have to help them through various systems such as education. The goal of this project is to understand which forms of CCW students utilize when deciding to pursue graduate education in physics and when they face challenges while in graduate school.

Publications:

• Tempkin, Cochran, Boone (in-press), Using community cultural wealth to understand experiences in physics bridge programs. In Physics Education Research Conference.

Funder: National Science Foundation

Description: This project uses a novel structure that initiates deep and systemic change within a single STEM discipline (physics) across multiple, high-ranking institutions and in close collaboration with the national disciplinary society: the American Physical Society. The research team, comprised of experts in intersectionality in physics, systemic change in higher education, inclusive faculty practice in advising, teaching and mentoring, and inclusion and equity research and practice within the American Physical Society will collectively engage with leading physics department teams. Acting as a research and practice backbone structure, this team will provide training in equity, change leadership, community buy-in, intersectionality, and action planning. The convening and post-convening activities center on a community of practice model, infused with equity and inclusion learning, sharing of evidence-based interventions, and supported with comprehensive data collection, analysis, and contextualization. 

Funder: National Science Foundation

Description: The overarching goal of this study is to address the performance inequities in introductory STEM courses by creating more inclusive spaces that support students' academic development. Previous research indicates a connection among learning communities, student engagement, social networks, and academic performance. Social Network Analysis provides a method for quantitatively describing these relationships. The goals of this project are to a) assess equity and inclusion in learning spaces for engineering students, including classrooms, b) quantify engineering students' access to social capital through peer networks in introductory courses, c) determine if access to social capital is a predictor for engineering students' academic success, and d) understand the relationships between student connection to the engineering community and their first-year experience in the engineering program. 

Funder: n/a

Description: The goal of this project is to determine gender representation in heavy-ion collisions, a subfield of nuclear physics. The project team is composed of mostly heavy-ion and spin physicists and two physics education researchers (Cochran and Jennifer Blue). Using an internal database that includes limited demographic information for members of the heavy-ion collision community including gender, classification as a theorist or experimentalist, and conference participation as determined by presentations (posters, parallel talks, and plenary talks) at Quark Matter, Hard Probes, Strangeness in Quark Matter, and Initial Stages.