Page 43 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic review
hypothesized, for instance, that the student condition curiosity and the learning environment condition team teaching have a positive relationship with the development of IDT. In addition, phased with gradual advancement appears to be a desirable condition of the learning process that is positively related with the learning outcome IDT and so on. Importantly, a proper balance between knowledge and skills development, repeated exposure, and scaffolding appears to be required to enable IDT (Ivanitskaya et al., 2002; Manathunga et al., 2006; Woods, 2007).
2.6 Conclusions and considerations
This literature review set out to disclose the subskills that constitute IDT and to unravel the typical student, learning environment, and learning process conditions that enable IDT development in interdisciplinary higher education. The first finding is that despite repeated acknowledgement of the lack of scientific research in the field of teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education (e.g., Lattuca et al., 2004), to date, such research has been limited and explorative. Second, the present review should be regarded as one of the first scientific studies to offer a clear and comprehensive view of the teaching and learning IDT in interdisciplinary higher education. Third, the adopted outcome-based approach, consistent with the theory of Biggs (2003), also appears to be innovative in interdisciplinary higher education presumably because interdisciplinary higher education is still being defined not in terms of what students gain in ability but in terms of its own pedagogical characteristics. It is desirable that the proposed performance view of interdisciplinary higher education be adopted since: (a) recent research (Misra et al., 2009) has exemplified the difficulty in realizing the beneficial synthesis or integration outcome, and (b) it will promote the unification of terminology as exemplified in the present review study, the need for which has been identified
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