Measuring interdisciplinary thinking in first year science students

Throughout their education students are presented knowledge in a fragmented way. Grammar is english, chemical bonding is chemistry, and soldering is shop, however, a scientist might use all three daily. Knowledge is not used in a fragmented way. More so, societal problems like climate change requires not only the communication of knowledge across a number of different sciences, but policy and sociology. No single discipline can address this problem. One of the key goals of any interdisciplinary program is to break down the siloed thinking that confines ideas to specific disciplines. While there is increasing interest in interdisciplinary science programs, there is a lack of documented research in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Our work has been guided by two fundamental research questions: 1. Do students in an interdisciplinary program “think differently” than students in a multidisciplinary program? 2. Are students in an interdisciplinary program more readily able to transfer knowledge across disciplinary boundaries than those is a multidisciplinary program? If so, can we measure it? In this talk we will present data from a large-scale evaluation of interdisciplinary thinking using two instruments, an attitude survey (N = 1600) and a card sort (N = 150) in the three options for first-year science at University of British Columbia: Choose Your Timetable, Coordinated Science, and Science One. We will first discuss how to classify interdisciplinarity vs multidisciplinary from a program design perspective and we will introduce a theoretical framework for evaluating interdisciplinarity. We will then show how attitudes towards interdisciplinarity and how the way students categorize textbook questions from disciplines change (or don\u27t) after one year of instruction