The performance of solving interdisciplinary problems for higher vocational college students

Abstract

Interdisciplinary teaching has been widely used in vocational education, which constructs the relationship among different disciplines and improves the ability of students to analyze and solve practical problems, while the examinations to assess the performance of students in soling interdisciplinary problems are limited. In this study, we investigated the performance of 164 students from Jiangsu Higher Vocational and Technical College in China in solving interdisciplinary problems, and analyzed the differences in students' aspects in solving these problems such as gender, majors, ages, self-efficacy and attitudes. After analyzing their scores using t test or ANOVA test, we found the female students had a better performance than male students (2.96 vs 2.28, p=0.001). Besides, the mean scores between students in majors was statistically different where students in major 1 (Big data and Accounting) had a significantly higher score (3.03 vs 2.44 and 2.23, p=0.001). Meanwhile, we found that students with a positive self-efficacy performed better than those students with the negative self-efficacy (3.07 vs 2.72, p=0.023). Hence, we believe that the differences are objectively existed in different students to solve interdisciplinary problems, and the personalized teaching methods should be carried out in the daily interdisciplinary teaching processes.