Page 100 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Chapter 5
5.3 Research questions
The present research investigated four research questions:
1. What do students report as challenges (content-related, incentive-related, and interaction-
related) in their IDT learning during the FQM course?
2. What do students report as learning strategies to overcome these challenges?
3. What do students report as disciplinary knowledge connections (fd–hd, fd–ac, tc–hd, tc–
ac) in their IDT learning during the FQM course?
4. What justification do students give for having made these disciplinary knowledge
connections?
The data was collected from two journals completed by each of the students, one journal to answer questions 1 and 2 and another to answer questions 3 and 4.
5.4 Method
5.4.1 Research context
The research context featured a constructively aligned instructional design for teaching broad IDT (Spelt et al., 2015). Figure 5.3 provides a simplified representation of this instructional design. The arrows in Figure 5.3 represent the constructive alignment between the four successive learning outcomes in IDT specific to this course, and the teaching, learning, and assessment elements. The four specific outcomes of IDT reflect the interdisciplinary research in FQM. This research involves four research phases (Luning & Marcelis, 2009b) and one specific learning outcome is related to each research phase. The four phases of the interdisciplinary FQM research are undertaken to analyse and solve FQM problems. The first phase is the problem appreciation phase; the second phase, the analysis phase, involves the
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