Page 13 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

General introduction
1.2 Defining interdisciplinary thinking
IDT as intended learning outcome in higher education is investigated to a limited extent. IDT or interdisciplinary understanding is defined in literature as:
“The capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines or established areas of expertise to produce a cognitive advancement – such as explaining a phenomenon, solving a problem, or creating a product – in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single
disciplinary means” (Boix Mansilla, Miller, & Gardner, 2000, p. 17)
Two types of IDT exist; one type is narrow IDT referring to the integration of disciplinary knowledge within a single science. The other type is broad IDT referring to the integration of disciplinary knowledge across sciences (Newell, 2007).
The concept of IDT can be found in literature by various synonyms, the commonly used one is ‘integration of disciplinary knowledge’ (e.g., Fortuin, Van Koppen, & Kroeze, 2013) or ‘synthesis’ (e.g., Defila & DiGiulio, 2015) which is the integration of knowledge to bring about an advance in understanding. Other synonyms are ‘the integrated approach’ or ‘the integrative approach’ (e.g., Linnemann, Schroën, & Van Boekel, 2011). These two terms refer to the approach of taking multiple disciplines in which individuals integrate the disciplinary knowledge in a meaningful way. The distinction between multidisciplinary thinking and IDT is the integration of disciplinary knowledge. With multidisciplinary thinking, the disciplinary knowledge is summarized without any attempt to integrate the knowledge (Klein, 2005). In literature and in practice, the terms ‘multidisciplinarity’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ are not so strictly used as in this thesis research. Similarly, the terms ‘knowledge integration’, ‘integrated curricula’, and ‘course integration’ also have various meanings in literature depending on the disciplinary origin of the particular study reported.
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