Page 16 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Chapter 1
should help teachers to develop pedagogical content knowledge for teaching and learning IDT (MacPhail, Tannehill, & GocKarp, 2013).
Pedagogical content knowledge as described by Shulman (1987, p. 8) involves “the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction”. In 2012, the publication of Biggs of 1999 was published again in the scientific journal of ‘Higher education research and development’ to, probably, accelerate this movement towards developing pedagogical content knowledge via the use of the constructive alignment theory of Biggs and Tang. The argument for using this theory to develop pedagogical content knowledge is the prescribed way of designing education, thereby prescribing teachers coming from different disciplines to formulate the learning outcomes beyond the disciplines and thereby connecting the disciplinary subjects (Brand & Triplett, 2012). Another argument is the resulting consistency of interdisciplinary learning environments via the constructive alignment, which may lead to the enhancement of student deep approaches to learning (Ten Dam, Van Hout, Terlouw, & Willems, 2004; Wang, Su, Cheung, Wong, & Kwong, 2013).
The few available scientific publications (e.g., Holley, 2013) on the learning of IDT in higher education focus more on the long-term (curriculum-related) rather than on the short- term (course-related) learning processes. In addition, the few publications show an explorative approach to investigate student learning, thereby taking a, predominantly, cognitive theoretical perspective. Systematic research on short-term student learning processes in HEE thereby taking, for instance, an integrated viewpoint to learning has not been conducted yet. Additionally, the suggested analytical characterization of these learning processes (Haynes & Brown Leonard, 2010) has also not been conducted yet. A comprehensive understanding of
6