Produced by Nathan Roberson, updated 2017 June 17, 11:15:40.

Introduction and Background

Science One is an “interdisciplinary science program” offered here at UBC to undergraduates in their first 2-years of science instruction. Students take all the same content courses they might take if they were in traditional science courses, however, being a part of a cohort, the program faculty have close collaboration with one another and develop curriculum together to foster interdisciplinary science connection across “disciplines”.

Last year, I worked with Dr. Chris Addison and Dr. James Charbonneau to develop a tool to attempt to measure interdiciplinary thinking using a card-sort activity. Students were asked to group 9 science questions four different ways: 1) & 2) - were “unframed conditions” were students were asked to sort the cards first in the way that made most sense to them. Then secondly, a different way from the first. 3) Framed - Discipline: Students were given three categories (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) and asked to place the cards in those groups. 4) Framed - Interdiscipline: Students were given three categories (electrostatics, energy conservation and flow, related rates/rates of change)

The hope is that if we are able to develop a way to measure interdisicplinary thinking, we might be able to better improve on instructional practices that support knowledge transfer across disiplines.

Hypothesis

  1. Our hypothesis was that “traditional” and “Science One” students would all be able to match the questions with their appropriate discipline.

  2. Then we suspected Science One students would be able to more correctly get the interdisciplinary pairings.

  3. But more importantly, we were interested in what students’ initial pairings would be (unframed). And are Science One students’ more likely to see the interdiciplinary connections without a framing?

Samples

-PHYS 101 Introductory Physics (collected between 2016-05-09 and 2016-05-12, N = 151).

-MATH 102 Introductory Math (collected between 2016-09-22 and 2016-12-27, N = 146).

-Sci1 Post Science One (collected on 2016-03-31, N = 61). These students were near the end of their first year in an interdisciplinary program.

-Sci1 Pre Science One (collected on 2016-09-08, N = 71). These students were in the first week of the interdisciplinary science program.

-MATH 103 Introductory Math, repeat test, end of 1st year (collected on 2017-04-04, N = 109). Of those, 93 matched student IDs from the MATH 102 sample.

-Sci1 Rpt Science One, repeat test (collected on 2017-04-06, N = 69). Of those, 69 matched student IDs from the Sci1 Pre sample.

Reference Matrix

Disciplinary Pairings. Interdisciplinary Pairings. This document compares pairing frequencies between classes. Each graph looks at either pairings from the Disciplinary or Interdisciplinay templates, and compares proportion of pairings made by class. Error bars show standard error.

Question 1: First Unframed Sort

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Question 2: Second Unframed Sort

Question 3: First Framed Sort

Question 4: Second Framed Sort

If you look at the Science One vs. Phys100 on the framed- interdisciplinary sort, it is clear that Science One students are more likely to match the referent interdisicplinary sort.

Going forward

This research is still ongoing. So, this analysis allows us some intiial conclusions about the nature of interdisiplinary thinking. These results have some possible implications for tool revision, but are quite promising.

Then, I like the heat maps, but I still think we are looking for another way to show these comparisons. ##### End of Report #####