Page 107 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Learning challenges, student strategies, and the outcomes of education in interdisciplinary thinking
involves the cognitively embedding of new ideas into existing ideas (Richter & Paretti, 2009), and because it involves the recognition of relationships between disciplinary knowledge elements that have different scales or units (Defila & DiGiulio, 2015; Eisen et al., 2009; Morse et al., 2007). Additionally, IDT may prompt the need to define the rules and boundaries of study and this may give rise to the challenge of feeling uncertain (incentive-related), whereas disciplinary thinking occurs in a context with predefined rules and boundaries of study (Lach, 2014). Furthermore, the time-management involved in doing interdisciplinary research is a known challenge (interaction-related), because working across disciplines takes time (Sharp, 2015) and learning to work across disciplines also takes time (Lyall, Bruce, Tait, & Meagher, 2011).
Table 5.2 Overview of subcategories of challenges per category of challenge
Category of challenge
Subcategories of challenges
Content- related
- Analysing the complex problem situations by viewing the multiple perspectives in an appropriate manner
- Linking, connecting, and integrating the disciplinary knowledge and practical information in reasonable combinations
- Maintaining an appropriate balance between the disciplinary knowledge elements in number and specificity
Incentive- related
- Coping with the uncertainty of selecting and categorizing the disciplinary knowledge
Interaction- related
- Finding relevant literature per discipline for the particular research phase
- Managing time between researching the relevant disciplines
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