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As the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS) continues to advance, there is an increased need for a quantum-smart workforce to address the needs of the growing quantum industry. As institutions begin to expand their course offerings, there is a unique opportunity for discipline-based education researchers to have an impact on the curricular and pedagogical choices being made in these courses. As a first step, it is necessary for education researchers to have a representative picture of what QIS education currently looks like. We reviewed recent course catalogues from a large sample of institutions in the United States looking for courses focused on QIS content. Our conservative analysis reveals that roughly a quarter of the institutions we reviewed offer QIS courses. While encouraging for such an emerging field, we found disparities in the types of institutions offering these courses as the vast majority were Doctoral-granting institutions. Additionally, we found that some classifications of minority serving institutions were much less likely to offer a QIS course (for example Historically Black Colleges and Universities or Predominantly Black Institutions), while Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions were more likely than the national average to offer a QIS course. These disparities may lead to further racial, socioeconomic, and geographic disparity in the future quantum workforce. We also found that there was no single department that offered a majority of the QIS courses, indicating that the best efforts to improve QIS education will need to consider the multi-disciplinary nature of the field of quantum information science. 

Significant focus in the PER community has been paid to student reasoning in undergraduate quantum mechanics. However, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging interdisciplinary quantum information science (QIS) courses. We conducted 15 exploratory think-aloud interviews with students in an upper-division quantum computing course at a large R1 university cross-listed in the physics and computer science departments. Focusing on responses to one particular problem, we identify two notably consistent problem-solving strategies across students in the context of a particular interview prompt, which we term Naive Measurement Probabilities (NMP) and Virtual Quantum Computer (VQC), respectively. Operating from a resources framework, we interpret these strategies as choices of coherent (and potentially mutually-generative) sets of resources to employ and available actions to perform. 

With the ongoing antiracism movement in the United States, there is a call for physics teachers to incorporate equity-based and antiracist activities and curricula into their classrooms. In an online summer professional development course for high school physics teachers, we listened to participants define and compare antiracism and equity. We identified three framings (dual, part-whole, and developmental) that characterize these high school physics teachers' conceptions of the relationship between equity and antiracism. The framings offer insights into physics teachers' notions of anti-racist practice in relation to equity and their concerns regarding enacting equity and antiracism in teaching practice. 

Physics is perceived to have a culture of exclusion, which includes not embracing individuals from certain demographics who are underrepresented in the field. Many who are from underrepresented groups have stated they feel impacted by cultural pressures to assimilate to what is traditionally considered a “physics person.” In order to better understand these cultural pressures this study examines statements from two physics teachers who participated in a summer professional development (PD) workshop. Throughout the summer PD, the two teachers made statements that described how physics culture impacted their identity and understanding of equity, which ultimately shaped their approach towards teaching. Analysis of teachers’ statements showed that physics culture impacted the teachers' views on instruction in the areas of inclusivity and shaping students' physics identity. This study has implications for research on the role of physics culture and how it impacts underrepresented students’ and teachers' identity and approach to equity.