Crossing Boundaries: Developing Transdisciplinary Skills in Engineering Education

Abstract

Transdisciplinary engineering curricula prepare future engineers with a holistic understanding of complex real-world problems, and the ability to tackle these problems with knowledge and skills in both engineering and non-engineering areas. What are transdisciplinary skills in the engineering education context? What learning activities can we design and implement to develop students’ transdisciplinary skills in the first-year engineering program? How can we assess transdisciplinary skills and evaluate the instructional effectiveness of these learning activities?The current study is an initial attempt to explore these questions. We introduce a conceptual framework ofusing systems thinking, empathy and metacognition asproxy indicators of transdisciplinary skills, and presentthe learning activities we have designed to developstudent competencies in these areas. In addition, wepropose an evaluation approach that includes a surveyinstrument and formative learning assessment, with which we investigate the relationships among empathy, systems thinking, and metacognitive skills in the context ofengineering education.