Page 127 - Teaching and learning of interdisciplinary thinking in higher education in engineering

General discussion
’receiving examples to familiarize oneself’, and with respect to learning such as ‘engaging in a range of disciplinary perspectives’ and ‘conducting disciplinary knowledge integration a number of times’ would help students in their IDT learning processes and outcomes. Furthermore, as shown in Figure 6.3 for the part of assessment tasks, it can be reasoned that design criteria with respect to assessment such as ‘determining concrete improvements’ and ‘tackling difficult issues during learning activities’ would help students in their IDT learning processes and outcomes. It is hypothesized that by constructively aligning these design criteria in education practice on learning how to solve complex problems in an interdisciplinary manner, the IDT learning processes and outcomes by engineering students would be better.
Considering the learning-focus of the present thesis research (see Figure 6.1), the learning theory of Illeris was applied to advance the understanding on teaching and learning IDT. Based upon the main results of chapter 4 (Table 4.3), the original model of the three dimensions of learning (see Figure 1.3) can be extended for each dimension of learning: content, incentive, and interaction. Figure 6.4 presents the extended learning dimensions model for IDT learning with the identified key learning experiences (Table 4.3). As shown in Figure 6.4, the identified key experiences for the content dimension are, for example, ‘understanding how to apply theoretical models or concepts to real-world situations’ and ‘becoming aware of disciplinary contributions to the analysis of complex problems’. In addition, the identified key experiences for the incentive dimension are, for instance, ‘frustrations in selecting and matching disciplinary knowledge to complex problems’ and ‘feeling ambiguous about not having a clear view on how to frame complex problems’. Moreover, two illustrations of the key experiences identified for the interaction learning dimension are: ‘dealing with the scheduled time for searching literature’ and ‘socially engaging with peers to recognize similarities in perceptions and experiences’. Considering the
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