A Framework to Guide Undergraduate Education in Interdisciplinary Science

Abstract

An expanded investment in interdisciplinary research has prompted greater demands to integrate knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. Vision and Change similarly made interdisciplinary expectations a key competency for undergraduate biology majors; however, we are not yet synchronized on the meaning of interdisciplinarity, making this benchmark difficult to meet and assess. Here, we discuss aspects of interdisciplinarity through a historical lens and address various institutional barriers to interdisciplinary work. In an effort to forge a unified path forward, we provide a working definition of interdisciplinary science derived from both the perspectives of science faculty members and scientific organizations. We leveraged the existing literature and our proposed definition to build a conceptual model for an Interdisciplinary Science Framework to be used as a guide for developing and assessing interdisciplinary efforts in undergraduate science education. We believe this will provide a foundation from which the community can develop learning outcomes, activities, and measurements to help students meet the Vision and Change core competency of “tapping into the interdisciplinary nature of science.”

Crossing Boundaries: Steps Toward Measuring Undergraduates’ Interdisciplinary Science Understanding

“…Within this category, more than half of our participants identified writing assignments through essays and papers as the preferred method of assessment (51%). This finding is consistent with a wealth of literature that suggests students must be given the opportunity to problem solve and think critically through writing when addressing the complexities involved in ID science (Boix-Mansilla et al, 2009;Chan et al 2010;Balgopal et al, 2012Balgopal et al, , 2017Gouvea et al, 2013;Cooper and Stowe, 2018;Tripp and Shortlidge, 2019). Thus, we support that instructors use writing-intensive activities as a mechanism to measure ID science understanding in an undergraduate setting.…”

“…That Align with the IDSF The majority of students discussed ideas that closely align with our previous work on science faculty's perceptions of ID science and the IDSF (Tripp and Shortlidge, 2019). Students' perceptions of ID science reflect almost all of the criteria in the IDSF as evidenced through interviews in this study.…”

“…These findings corroborate Borrego and Newswander's work (2010), stating that the natural and physical sciences rely on collaboration at higher rates than other disciplines. The inclusion of this theme is also strongly supported by the IDSF (Tripp and Shortlidge, 2019) highlighting the importance of interacting across disciplines and suggesting this as a fundamental cornerstone of ID science understanding.…”

“…Writing-to-learn, a constructivist teaching strategy that allows students to construct their own understanding by first thinking and writing about a topic before actually engaging in content-related activities, has been more recently adopted in the sciences (Carlson, 2007;Balgopal and Wallace, 2009;Balgopal et al, 2012Balgopal et al, , 2017. Writing-to-learn aligns with work suggesting that students will likely need to think interdisciplinarily before engaging in ID science research (Tripp and Shortlidge, 2019). Yet it remains relatively unknown whether instructors are encouraging ID science thinking, and if so, how they assess this ability in an undergraduate classroom.…”

“…On the basis of results from our faculty survey, we created a writing assignment to collect a sample of science students' abilities to think interdisciplinarily. Additional reasons for developing a writing assignment were threefold: writing activities are being adopted at a higher rate in science to encourage critical-thinking skills (Connolly and Vilardi, 1989;Carlson, 2007;Balgopal and Wallace, 2009;Balgopal et al, 2012Balgopal et al, , 2017; we sought to engage students in connecting multiple disciplines in a cohesive manner by first thinking through an ID lens (Tripp and Shortlidge, 2019); and the assignment served as an artifact to measure students' ID understanding using the aforementioned rubric developed by Boix Mansilla et al (2009).…”