Abstract:

In modern life larger percentage of jobs requires employees who think critically and creatively and are able to make innovative but informed decisions. Therefore, the primary focus on 21st century science classroom is to develop students with profound understanding of knowledge. This can be achieved by leading students to higher order thinking skills that highlight problem solving, decision-making and question-asking capabilities (Canas et.al, 2017). In addition to that researchers emphasize the advantages of knowledge domain between different disciplines. In other words, the subject content needs to be taught with the aim to develop student interdisciplinary knowledge. One difficulty in pedagogical approaches to improve interdisciplinary knowledge is a lack of effective assessment and evaluation tools (Repko, 2007). It is challenging by teachers to understand how students demonstrate their interdisciplinary understanding by integrating multiple source of knowledge from two or more disciplines. Therefore, the primary focus of this study is to explore different methods in order to assess students’ interdisciplinary understanding by constructing concept maps.

The research question of the study is: how to measure the interdisciplinary understanding with concept maps?
In this paper interdisciplinarity is viewed as a major element in concept mapping. It is a process of integrating two or more concepts from different disciplines by bringing learner to create new meaning, perspective or approach that enhance formation of interdisciplinary knowledge (Reiska et.al, 2018). Interdisciplinary learning usually aims to identify solutions that fosters break down the disciplinary boundaries and integrate knowledge or skill to see larger context. In learning sciences, we often face the fact that the learning goals and topics fall in-between different fields. One important aspect in learning sciences is to help students to get in-depth conceptual understanding that can be mastering through interdisciplinary studies (You, et al. 2018). There are number of researchers who discuss the advantages of interdisciplinarity in pedagogy. The main challenge of interdisciplinarity is to assess learners’ ability to integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines (Reiska, et al, 2018, You, et al 2018

We collected data from more than 1200 high school students at the beginning and at the end of high school. For data collection we used concept mapping.

We compared the different assessment methods for concept maps to measure the interdisciplinary understanding of students. In the presentation the results will be introduced.

References:
[1] Cañas, A. J., Reiska, P., & Möllits, A. (2017). Developing higher-order thinking skills with concept mapping: A case of pedagogic frailty. Knowledge Management & E-Learning, 9(3), 348–365.
[2] Reiska, P., Soika, K., & Cañas, A. J. (2018). Using concept mapping to measure changes in interdisciplinary learning during high school. Knowledge Management & E-Learning, 10(1), 1–24.
[3] Repko, A. 2007. “Integrating Interdisciplinarity: How the Theories of Common Ground and Cognitive Interdisciplinarity Are Informing the Debate on Interdisciplinary Integration.” Issues in Integrative Studies 3 (25): 1–31.
[4] You HS, Marshall JA, Delgado C. (2018). Assessing students’ disciplinary and interdisciplinary understanding of global carbon cycling. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 55, 377–398.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary learning, assessment, concept mapping.