2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

BPE Track 2: Capturing the Narratives of Neurodivergent Undergraduate Engineering Students

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

Neurodivergent people bring valuable strengths such as creativity, analytical acuity, and spatial abilities to engineering, yet they leave engineering programs at higher rates than their neurotypical peers. This attrition has contributed to the overall underrepresentation of neurodivergent engineers in the STEM workforce and may be attributed to several systemic and sociocultural factors including poor academic support and pervasive narratives that frame neurodivergence as a deficit rather than a difference. Guided by a social constructionist framework, this three-year mixed methods study examines how neurodivergent engineering students understand, describe, and leverage their strengths and challenges while navigating undergraduate engineering programs. Stage 1 (QUANT) used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze neurodivergent discourse on social media, while Stage 2 (QUAL) involves longitudinal interviews conducted with neurodivergent undergraduate engineering students at a four-year university in the western United States and cross-sectional interviews conducted with neurodivergent undergraduate engineering students nationwide. In this paper, we highlight the initial findings from a series of longitudinal interviews conducted at a single university with Via (pseudonym), a current undergraduate engineering student, and Tom (pseudonym), a recent graduate of an undergraduate engineering program. Our findings underscore the importance of community, suggesting that fostering community is not a peripheral support strategy but a core component of inclusive engineering education.

Authors

Dr. Cassandra McCall http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0240-432X Utah State University [biography]

Dr. Cassandra McCall is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Education Department at Utah State University (USU). Her research focuses on the intersections of disability, identity formation, and culture and uses anti-ableist approaches to enhance universal access for students with disabilities in STEM, particularly in engineering. At USU, she serves as the Co-Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Transition Services. In 2024, Dr. McCall received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to identify systemic opportunities for increasing the participation of people with disabilities in engineering. Her award-winning publications have been recognized by leading engineering education research journals at both national and international levels. Dr. McCall has led several workshops promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities and other minoritized groups in STEM. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering with a structural engineering emphasis.
Dr. Catherine Mcgough Spence http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5288-8345 Minnesota State University, Mankato [biography]

Catherine Spence is an Associate Professor at Iron Range Engineering in the Integrated Engineering Department at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She received her PhD in Engineering and Science Education in 2019 and a BS in Electrical Engineering in 2014 at Clemson University.
Vanessa Tran Utah State University [biography]

Bachelor's Degree: Civil Engineering, the University of Architecture, Vietnam.
Master's Degree: Global Production Engineering and Management, Vietnamese - German University, Vietnam.
Ph.D. Student in Engineering Education, College of Engineering, Utah State University.
Hamid Karimi Utah State University [biography]

I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University (MSU) in 2021. My main research interest during my Ph.D. was artificial intelligence (AI) for social good and focused on several exciting directions, including AI in education, computational politics, and misinformation detection.
Autumn Cuellar Utah State University [biography]

Autumn Cuellar is a Ph.D. student in Engineering Education. Her undergraduate and master's careers were both in Computer Science. She believes that everyone can achieve their goals, regardless of physical ability. This is why Autumn strives to make engineering accessible for everyone.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

« View session

For those interested in:

Academia-Industry Connections
Advocacy and Policy
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
disability