Page 93 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

Learning challenges, student strategies, and the outcomes of education in interdisciplinary thinking
knowledge of more than one discipline to produce a cognitive advancement that would have been impossible within a single discipline (Boix Mansilla et al., 2000). IDT learning outcomes are demonstrations of this integrative ability; they involve the demonstration of a complex cognitive skill (Van Merriënboer, 1997) constituting five subskills, namely: (1) knowledge of disciplines, (2) knowledge of disciplinary paradigms, (3) knowledge of interdisciplinarity, (4) higher-order cognitive skills, and (5) communication skills (Spelt et al., 2009). This means that students in HEE need to acquire particular kinds of knowledge and skills before they are able to practise IDT. The conceptual distance between the disciplinary knowledge determines the ease with which IDT is practised. Narrow IDT is the name given when the conceptual distance is relatively small and broad IDT when the conceptual distance is relatively great (Newell, 2007). Students in HEE need to learn broad IDT, specifically the ability to integrate disciplinary knowledge of natural and social sciences (Lund et al., 2006; Lyall & Meagher, 2012; Mobley et al., 2014; Schmidt et al., 2012; Spelt et al., 2010). This need necessitates the scientific understanding of student learning on broad IDT in HEE.
The distinction between the learning outcomes on multidisciplinary thinking and IDT is the integration of disciplinary knowledge (Klein, 2010). With multidisciplinary thinking, the disciplinary knowledge is summarized, and may be supplemented with an overview of similarities and differences in disciplinary knowledge, however, no integration of knowledge takes place, let alone advances understanding. The difference between multidisciplinary thinking and IDT is reflected in student learning outcomes in HEE. Student learning outcomes on multidisciplinary thinking (e.g., a report or a presentation) shows the knowledge of the disciplines one by one, without any attempt to link, to connect, and to integrate the knowledge (Klein, 2005). More specifically, the multidisciplinary thinking outcome involves the analysis element of cognitive endeavour, while the IDT outcome involves the analysis and the synthesis elements of cognitive endeavour. The synthesis element is concerned with (a)
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