A Framework to Guide Undergraduate Education in Interdisciplinary Science.

CBE Life Sci Educ

Department of Biology, Portland State University, Portland, OR 97201.

Published: June 2019

An expanded investment in interdisciplinary research has prompted greater demands to integrate knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. similarly made interdisciplinary expectations a key competency for undergraduate biology majors; however, we are not yet synchronized on the meaning of interdisciplinarity, making this benchmark difficult to meet and assess. Here, we discuss aspects of interdisciplinarity through a historical lens and address various institutional barriers to interdisciplinary work. In an effort to forge a unified path forward, we provide a working definition of interdisciplinary science derived from both the perspectives of science faculty members and scientific organizations. We leveraged the existing literature and our proposed definition to build a conceptual model for an Interdisciplinary Science Framework to be used as a guide for developing and assessing interdisciplinary efforts in undergraduate science education. We believe this will provide a foundation from which the community can develop learning outcomes, activities, and measurements to help students meet the core competency of "tapping into the interdisciplinary nature of science."

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6755209PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.18-11-0226DOI Listing

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