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Physics mentors play an important role in supporting students in postsecondary education and in their transition to graduate school and careers. The knowledge and beliefs physics mentors have about disability can affect how they mentor students with disabilities. We administered the Disability and Physics Careers Survey (DPCS) to 237 practicing physicists recruited through physics-specific listservs to measure their knowledge about disability and beliefs about the viability of physics careers for people with different disability diagnoses. This study compares practicing physicists’ varied knowledge about different categories of impairments and diagnoses, and their beliefs about the viability of future careers for students with specific impairments. We present our findings examining the knowledge of practicing physicists about disability, their beliefs about the viability of certain physics careers for people with disabilities, and how those beliefs may vary depending on their personal disability experience. 

Nearly half of STEM majors in the United States express interest in becoming a grade 7-12 teacher, yet as a nation we face a shortage of qualified math and science teachers. Studies have found that misperceptions about grade 7-12 math and science teaching are impacting student career choices. As part of the Get the Facts Out project, this work addresses faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching because faculty play an important role in student career decisions. Additionally, understanding how faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching differ may inform targeted efforts to change perceptions in the future. In this study, nearly 500 college STEM faculty members' perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching were measured using a newly developed survey. Faculty perceptions were then compared based on department affiliation, position type, and gender. No significantly practical differences were found based on these demographics. Implications for STEM teacher recruitment are discussed. 

The United States is facing a critical shortage of grade 7-12 teachers in the STEM disciplines, particularly in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Faculty members play a major role in their students' career choices, and faculty members' perceptions of the profession may determine whether students choose to pursue teaching. To this end, we developed two surveys to measure student and faculty perceptions of grade 7-12 teaching. We found that both groups hold many incorrect beliefs about teaching careers. Furthermore, we found that faculty members believe they are quite supportive of future teachers, while students perceive that they are less supportive. Our findings highlight the need for both faculty members and students to be informed about the benefits of careers in grade 7-12 teaching. Additionally, our results suggest that faculty members should work to dispel their internal biases surrounding the teaching profession, which may inadvertently drive students away from grade 7-12 teaching. 

Results from the Perceptions of Teaching as a Profession (PTaP) instrument--which measures views students have of the grade 7-12 teaching career--prompted the development of a parallel instrument to measure the perceptions of the grade 7-12 teaching profession in the eyes of those advising and influencing student opinions of the profession: the faculty. Thirty faculty interviews were conducted across four different institutions of higher education as part of the development of the Perceptions of Teaching as a Profession in Higher Education (PTaP.HE) instrument, which investigates faculty opinions, accuracy of information, and thoughts regarding grade 7-12 teaching. The instrument measures the perceived supportive (or unsupportive) nature of a department towards the teaching profession, guide teacher preparation organizations on how to approach faculty, and correlate students' perceptions with their influencers. Faculty interviews verified statement interpretation consistency, while also providing anecdotal insights into faculty views. 

We present the results of a survey of 220 faculty members at selective liberal arts colleges who teach introductory STEM courses. The survey was designed to learn how these faculty support student quantitative skills development in their introductory courses and what high-school-level quantitative skills are the most challenging for their incoming introductory students. In particular, we wanted to identify the skills that students struggled with across different disciplines in order to explore collaborative development of shared online modules to support student quantitative skills review and practice in many different introductory STEM courses. Five priority topic areas emerged – graphs and tables, descriptive statistics, exponents/logarithms, intercepts/slopes of lines, and confidence intervals/standard error – although there were significant disciplinary differences.