Page 106 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Chapter 5
Students reflected on the challenge of connecting the disciplinary knowledge in a meaningful way (content), on the confusion arising from crossing disciplinary boundaries due to the overwhelming amount of disciplinary knowledge and number of possibilities involved in demarcating complex problems (incentive), and they reflected on the need for collaborating with peers and for finding adequate information to be able to reason in a consistent way during their interdisciplinary research (interaction). Empirical research (D' Mello & Graesser, 2012; D' Mello et al., 2014) on the affective states during complex learning has shown that confusion can be beneficial to learning, once the confusion (incentive) is successfully resolved. The attempt to achieve resolution is likely to lead to engagement and flow. Should, however, the attempt fail, confusion is likely to lead to frustration and then boredom. This mechanism illustrates the importance of the successful resolution of the reported confusion during IDT learning.
The results showed that students reflected more often on the challenge categories of content (106 times) and interaction (38 times) than on the challenge category of incentive (six times). Possible explanations for this difference in frequency are: students do not consider their emotions to be part of their learning processes, students do not regard emotions as learning challenges, students prefer not to reflect on this kind of challenge, students do not face incentive-related challenges during IDT learning, students were not triggered to report on this kind of challenge due to the manner of interrogation, students might not be able to reflect on their emotions because their emotional intelligence is as yet insufficiently developed (Goleman, 1996), and students might not dare to reflect on their emotions since they might perceive this to be too personal.
Table 5.2 presents the subcategories of each category of challenges. All the identified subcategories relate to the achievement of the IDT learning outcomes. For example, the making of meaningful connections is considered as challenging (content-related), because it
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