Project by: Dakota Law (11th Grade), Layne Friedman (11th Grade)
Project Advisor: Kelly O’Shea
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Catherine (Dakota) and Arturo (Layne)

We began our project not knowing how we would find data that could help us understand access to physics education in New York City. However, it didn’t take us long to find the New York City Physics Regents results from the DOE. Here is what we learned after analyzing the results through lenses of race and gender.

View our complete slide show here!

Reflection:

This project required a ton of new skills for both of us. On the most basic level that meant we had to learn how to use a new software program and figure out how to configure massive spreadsheets to make sure we could distinguish the data we wanted.  However, it also meant making sure we did justice to the pretty jaw-dropping data points we found. While many of the findings proved the inequities we imagined to exist it was often still a challenge to make sure we were adequately conveying all the information. When you create a map or chart and know exactly the data that’s forming it, it is much easier to understand what’s going on than it might be for everyone else. Sometimes it was hard to choose what aspects of our data were significant and which weren’t.  It took meeting with others and sharing, our sometimes messy, in-process work to make sure that everything we had created made sense. In the end, though we have created what we hope can be shared with others to help highlight educational, more specifically physics education, inequity in the city, so that this problem can be addressed in meaningful and significant ways.

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Please write a description of the project you are proposing. Why do you want to take this on, and what do you hope to learn?

We would like to work with Kelly to learn more about access to physics in various parts of the country. Kelly has talked with us about the work she does to make physics curriculum more accessible and we would like to better understand why there is a disparity in access to physics as well as look at possible solutions and how they work/don’t work.
We would like to do this project because both Layne and I are very interested in physics and have had the opportunity to take two full years of it with Kelly.

Critical thinking, creativity, citizenship and courage are essential LREI learning values. Explain how you’ll draw on at least one of these values to complete your proposed project?

We will be critically thinking about how various intersecting identities affect education inequity within physics classes, contrasting our experiences and recognizing our privileges in our community with the lack of privilege people in other communities might have. We will also be critically thinking about solutions for this problem.

What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project? How do you plan to share your learnings with the larger LREI community (e.g., exhibit of work, poster of learnings, performance, etc.)?

Our outcome would be a proposal on how to take and analyze data based on the project Kelly is working on outside of school. This project works on how to widen access to physics through teaching science teachers how to implement physics (similar to the way we are learning it now) even though it might be out of their subject. The final outcome would take into account all that we have learned about lack of access to physics as well as the information about the program Kelly is working on in order to try and create a way to see how effective this program actually is/whether or not it has a lasting effect on the students.

Please provide a general outline that indicates your work plan for the trimester? What are some of the key project benchmarks (i.e., goals that will help to ensure that you finish the project)?

Until the end of January is research on information that is already out there about who has access to strong physics education
February and March is going to be brainstorming and planning/writing the proposal

When do you plan on meeting?
Monday lunch