In spring 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, some intrepid employers quickly converted internships to virtual experiences rather than canceling them. SRI’s STEM Core Expansion Alliance evaluation team took advantage of this unprecedented growth in remote internships in STEM fields to capture innovations and lessons learned from these improvised programs.
SRI investigated employers’ strategies for recruiting, mentoring, and supporting remote interns. The team examined whether and how students used employer supports and what they gained from networking and professional learning opportunities in the virtual context. SRI paid particular attention to strategies for making virtual internships more accessible and equitable for all students and for diversifying intern cohorts.
The team used results from surveys of and interviews with employers and interns to develop guidance for employers. The resulting report offers a rich, cross-sector look at what STEM employers learned from their experiences and clearly conveys how they can improve their virtual internship programs in the future.
Elise Levin-Guracar
SRI Author
Emerging Leaders Program: Impacts on Students, Teachers, and Leaders in Three Sites
In 2017–18, New Leaders partnered with SRI Education to undertake a randomized control trial of the Emerging Leaders program in three sites: Arlington Independent School District and San Antonio Independent School District in Texas and Shelby County Schools in Tennessee. The Emerging Leaders program was implemented largely as designed and had a positive, statistically significant impact on participants’ data-driven instruction leadership knowledge. This large impact on leadership knowledge led to few measured impacts on the instructional practice of teachers on Emerging Leaders participants’ instructional teams. The program had positive impacts on the math achievement of some subgroups of students. Impacts on overall math achievement were mediated by (i.e., operated through) program impacts on participants’ leadership knowledge and by teachers’ participation on instructional teams. The Emerging Leaders program had no measured impact on students’ English language arts (ELA) achievement. Supplemental analyses suggest that these differences in student achievement impacts may have been driven by differences in how datadriven instruction was enacted by math- and ELA-focused instructional teams.
Designing Smartphone Microlessons to Improve the Cybersecurity Workforce
This is a poster presented at the 4th annual Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace principal investigators’ meeting.
