2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper advances our multi-year, student-driven research project examining the experiences of neurodivergent learners in STEM majors at a large R1 institution in the southeastern United States. Building on our prior work presented at ASEE 2024 and 2025, which introduced an exploratory survey and reported evidence-based revisions to broaden reach and deepen construct coverage, this study extends our methodological narrative from survey design to participant-centered interviewing.

Following institution-wide survey administration in Spring 2025, our undergraduate researchers organized into four themed groups: Accommodation and Inclusion, Cultural Perceptions and Social Media, Mental Health and Well-being, and Strengths-Based Approaches. Each group identified prospective interviewees using respondents' survey responses, then constructed individualized semi-structured interview protocols that anchor prompts to each participant's own survey responses. This design preserves consistency across a shared protocol structure while enabling tailored follow-ups aligned to the participant's context, vocabulary, and priorities. Consistent with the project's strengths-based stance and "nothing about us without us" ethos, our neurodivergent and neurotypical student researchers collaboratively refined questions, piloted accessibility options (e.g., advanced question previews, multimodal response choices), and iterated on pacing and rapport-building practices. Our plan for analysis uses a deductive-inductive thematic analysis: initial code families derive from the four themes and prior survey constructs, then expand inductively as patterns emerge within and across interviews. Quality procedures include reflexive memos, peer debriefing among theme teams, and an auditable link from survey items to individualized prompts and coded excerpts.

This paper's contribution is twofold. Substantively, we report interview-based findings that elaborate on how neurodivergent learners in STEM navigate institutional structures and learning environments related to aspects of cultural perception and mental health, with attention to actionable strengths-based implications for instruction, advising, and policy. Methodologically, we offer a replicable survey-to-interview structure that: (1) operationalizes individualized semi-structured protocols; (2) scaffolds undergraduate researchers to conduct rigorous, inclusive qualitative work within a course-based undergraduate research experience; and (3) documents concrete practices for accessibility in interviewing neurodivergent participants. We extend our earlier phases from instrument development and piloting to an empirically grounded interviewing approach that other course-based or lab-based teams can adapt in studies of equity and inclusion in STEM education.