Development of Interdisciplinary Lessons Integrating Science and Engineering in Heterogeneous Teams: Education Students’ Attitudes

Aharon Gero

doi:10.3991/ijep.v6i2.5683

Abstract

The course “Interdisciplinary Aspects in Science and Engineering Education” is a unique course designed to expose students of science and engineering education to the characteristics of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. The theoretical part of the course deals with the nature of science and engineering and the interaction between the two, various hierarchies describing the level of integration between disciplines, and possible strategies for developing interdisciplinary lessons. In the practical section, the participants develop, in heterogeneous teams of students from different academic backgrounds, an interdisciplinary lesson integrating science and engineering, and teach it to their peers. Using qualitative tools, the research described in this paper characterized the attitudes of 112 students towards developing an interdisciplinary lesson as part of a team. The findings indicate that the students identified both the difficulties involved in developing an interdisciplinary lesson as part of a team and the advantages inherent to teamwork. It was further found that the weight of the attitude component that recognized the contribution of teamwork to the development of interdisciplinary lessons was considerably higher than the weight of the component indicating the difficulties that involved teamwork.

Highlights

Interdisciplinarity is the integration or synthesis of knowledge from various disciplines [1]
About one fifth (18.75%) of the students answering the questionnaire thought that work in teams contributed to reinforcing their sense of self-confidence: “In a team you can rehearse the lesson [in front of the rest of the team members], and the rehearsals reinforce the sense of selfconfidence”
The students indicated two primary difficulties: about one third (30.40%) of the students stated that they encountered difficulty in choosing an interdisciplinary topic which was agreed upon by all members of the team: “As a team it’s difficult to pick a topic which interests everyone”, and approximately one quarter (24.10%) of the students noted the difficulty in getting agreement from the team members regarding the contents of the lesson: “The greatest difficulty is deciding what to include in the lesson and what not to... sometimes one of the team members really likes a certain example, but someone else does not”

Summary

Introduction

Interdisciplinarity is the integration or synthesis of knowledge from various disciplines [1]. In view of the expectation that interdisciplinary learning will contribute to the development of higher-order thinking skills [2,3] and increase the motivation to study [4], numerous high-school courses integrating science and engineering have been developed. Alongside the benefits inherent to the aforementioned interdisciplinary programs, there are fundamental challenges in developing and implementing such curricula. These challenges stem, inter alia, from the difficulty in developing a course which balances the interdisciplinary and the disciplinary elements [12], and the difficulty teachers teaching interdisciplinary courses have in coping with a field or with fields of knowledge they have not been trained to teach [13]

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Discussion

Conclusion