Page 42 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Chapter 2
2.5.4 Which learning process conditions that influence interdisciplinary thinking within the context of interdisciplinary higher education are mentioned?
Six learning process conditions, divided into two categories, seemed to be important to enabling IDT (see Table 2.1). The first category, pattern, contains four conditions: phased with gradual advancement, linear, iterative, and milestones with encountering questions. These four conditions seem to point to the need for a gradual, linear, phased pattern combined with predetermined learning outcomes that serve as milestones for each phase in which students are repeatedly exposed to IDT (Graybill et al., 2006; Ivanitskaya et al., 2002; Manathunga et al., 2006; Woods, 2007). It has been suggested that this development process may follow that of Biggs’ SOLO taxonomy (Ivanitskaya et al., 2002) or intellectual maturation theories such as that of Perry (Field & Lee, 1992). The second category, learning activities, includes the conditions learning activities aimed at achieving interdisciplinarity and learning activities aimed at achieving reflection. Both conditions likely refer to the need for learning activities aiming at the acquisition of subskills of IDT. In particular, provoking students in contrasting and conflicting disciplinary perspectives combined with developing a critical stance seems to be essential to stimulate students to depart from their notion of absolute knowledge (Ivanitskaya et al., 2002; Lattuca et al., 2004).
2.5.5 Which relationships between student, learning environment, and learning process conditions and interdisciplinary thinking within the context of interdisciplinary higher education are mentioned?
No empirical evidence was provided by the publications reviewed regarding the relationships between student, learning environment, and learning process conditions and IDT. However the review results, as presented in Table 2.1, do provide the basis for several hypothetical relationships between the identified conditions and the learning outcome IDT. It can be
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