2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite a long-standing history of policies for equity, inclusion, and capacity-building in science and technology, the US educational system has yet to sufficiently broaden participation in STEM (BPiS) to meet growing demand for advanced technology skills.
This qualitative case study assesses to what extent regular dialogs with three underrepresented engineering students following the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) method improved students’ learning and persistence, contributing to US BPiS goals and aspirations. In this study, STIR is used to address the competency gap where little or no consideration of societal impacts occur during technical learning and decisions by engineering students. The setting for technical learning and decision-making takes place in an internship, which is a high impact practice for experiential learning in engineering education.

Traditionally internships focus primarily on technological projects. However in this study, over the course of multiple STIR dialogs with a social scientist, participating computing and information systems (CIS) students expanded upon their de facto practices through increased awareness of societal impacts during technology centric projects. In some instances, this awareness led to altering decisions and practices as they incorporated societal values and impacts in their technology projects. This phenomenon concurs with findings from other STIR studies.

During the internship, each individual discussed their own challenge(s) in meeting certain internship requirements. In a STIR dialog focussed on the challenge, each formulated strategies to address the challenge, and later acted on the strategy – contributing to continued persistence and completion of the internship. After the internship, additional persistence paths were discovered as internship completers earned CIS degrees, pursued higher degrees, and/or transitioned to a job in their field of study.

After learning the technology, STIR dialogs increased consideration of societal impacts in making technical decisions which supported equitable service to a vulnerable community, potentially enabling broader impacts beyond the engineers-in-the-making in this study. A new term, SocioTechnical learning, was coined to characterize the empirically observed steps in this case study: learning technical skills, learning to reason about societal contexts of technology decisions, and applying both social and technical learning in decision-making during their CIS projects.

The overall finding from this case study is that STIR amplifies the potential for work-based experiences such as internships to broaden participation in STEM.

Three ways that STIR supported the overall finding include: 1) Changes to participant awareness, behaviors and practices that considered societal impacts occurred over time as demonstrated in other STIR studies; 2) strengthened persistence during and after the internship; and 3) SocioTechnical Learning, an empirically observed phenomenon.