Students with learning disabilities (LD) (particularly those with autism spectrum disorder) are not being hired as workers in STEM fields at rates that match their peers. There is a critical need to recruit, educate, and mentor students with LD to join the STEM workforce beyond graduation, especially as many of these bright individuals hold compensatory gifts that make them well-suited for particular areas within STEM fields. The Access to Innovative Education: STEM Opportunities for Students with Learning Disabilities (AIE-STEM) project will provide scholarship support for students at Landmark College studying Computer Science or Life Sciences. As Landmark College exclusively serves LD students, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), all AIE-STEM scholars will have a diagnosed LD. The AIE-STEM project will provide between 5 and 13 scholarships annually to low-income, academically promising students with LD (24 unique students will be served by the AIE-STEM program over five years). In addition to financial support, the AIE-STEM project will provide students with mentoring, internship opportunities, research experiences, and peer support. Mentoring will be provided by Landmark College faculty in the discipline. Research will focus on the impact of mentoring on the LD identity development and positive experiences in internship and research placements.
The research component of the project will investigate how effective mentoring leads to better outcomes for students with LD in STEM fields. In particular, it is hypothesized that a stronger LD identity is formed via mentoring and leads to positive experiences in internship and research placements. Two specific research questions will be addressed through the AIE-STEM project: (1) In what ways does mentoring assist students in developing a healthy Disabilities Identity, and (2) In what ways does mentoring impact success in internship experiences and research? All AIE-STEM students will take a measure of Learning Disabilities Identity Development (LDID) to provide baseline data. Throughout the first year, students will participate in monthly cohort meetings and begin meeting with a faculty mentor. In Year 2, students will identify undergraduate research projects and/or internship placements. During the final meeting of each award year, participants will again complete the LDID measure and measures of mentorship involvement. At this final cohort meeting, a focus group interview will be conducted to collect information about mentoring effectiveness. Disabilities Identity Development data will be analyzed to assess the effectiveness of mentoring in the psychosocial aspect. Data collected from the mentoring measures will inform the impact of mentoring on research and internship experiences. Data collected about mentoring effectiveness will be used to make ongoing corrections to the mentor model. The data will also inform best practice related to mentoring students with LD.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
