Page 109 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Learning challenges, student strategies, and the outcomes of education in interdisciplinary thinking
reasoning (content-related), being more open-minded and trying to be creative (incentive- related), listening carefully to the lectures and student presentations; discussing with peers, and searching for literature and handbooks that describe the disciplinary connections (interaction-related). The impact of these strategies to overcome the challenges should be investigated to identify which learning strategies good IDT students use and which factors affect their choice of strategy.
Table 5.4 Overview of subcategories of learning strategies per category of challenge
Category of challenge
Subcategories of learning strategies
Content- related
- Gaining a good picture of what is happening in the problem situation by linking the disciplinary knowledge and practical information
- Rethinking of the problem situation and organizing the connections between T and M-related disciplinary knowledge, using flow diagrams
- Writing down in one's own words the thoughts and gathered information and reflect upon the logical reasoning
Incentive- related
- Being more open-minded about what interdisciplinary research actually involves
- Being creative in the use of search terms across the disciplines
Interaction- related
- Re-reading all information, asking, and listening to teachers, and discussing with peer students to learn their ‘tips and tricks’
- Searching for literature that already connects the disciplinary knowledge and for literature that aids the recognition of these connections
5.5.3 Disciplinary knowledge connections (research question 3)
Table 5.5 illustrates the kind of disciplinary knowledge connections that were reported per category of disciplinary knowledge connection. The example provided for the fd–hd category shows how the interaction between the knowledge of operators (hd, human dynamics) and the
ripeness of tomatoes (fd, food dynamics) impacts decision-making concerning the quality of 99