ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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STEM Workforce Development STEM Workforce Development  STEM Learning and Learning Environments STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Investigating the impact of online internships in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic

Effective Years: 2020-2021

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions will partner with Parker Dewey to generate a robust mixed-methods dataset about the impact of online internships on student progression. Internships, mandated by many STEM academic programs, are a form of work-based learning that can lead to academic and workforce success for undergraduate and graduate students. Traditional face-to-face internships also can enhance students’ social networks and technical and transferrable professional skills. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made face-to-face internships untenable for many workplaces, with stay-at-home orders and social distancing requirements, resulting in a large influx of college students to vendors such as Parker Dewey seeking these opportunities. However, there is little research on the quality of online or micro-internships, and higher education professionals have little knowledge about their students’ experiences with these new forms of work-based learning and their subsequent impact on students’ career and academic development. This study will fill this need by contributing both new empirical insights on online internships as well as actionable knowledge to inform faculty and career advisors’ decision making about students’ internship opportunities during and beyond the pandemic.

The project will examine the following research questions: (1) What are the demographic characteristics of past (2015 to early 2020) and current online interns? (2) What types of tasks and mentoring are experienced by online interns? (3) What is the impact of an online internship on student career and academic development, professional networks, and transferable skills? and, (4) What are the prospects for online internships to adopt innovations in virtual simulations to enhance the internship experience? These questions will be answered through three distinct yet inter-related studies that include analyses of Parker Dewey’s past student participants (n=1,500), surveys (n=2,500) and interviews (n=50) with current Parker Dewey program participants, and interviews with employers in STEM-related fields (n=25) regarding the format of internship programs amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the research leverages the strengths of large-scale survey data and the more fine-grained “insider” perspective of qualitative data. The study will be the first empirical study of online internships and represents a significant contribution to the fields of experiential learning and workforce development. Given the likelihood that online internships and some form of social distancing will continue, generating rapid scientifically rigorous findings on this topic is a time-sensitive concern for U.S. higher education.

This RAPID award is made by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program in the Division of Graduate Education/Directorate of Education and Human Resources, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. ECR supports fundamental research focused on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.