2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background Interdisciplinary graduate education is not only an urgent need for scientific and technological innovation toward socioeconomic development, but also in line with the law of the growth of top-notch innovative talents, and has now become an important trend in the reform of global graduate education. The transformation has stimulated some forms of interdisciplinary experiences including critical thinking awareness, interdisciplinary team teaching, etc. However, little is known about the core characteristics that shape interdisciplinary competence and latent influence mechanism.

Purpose/Hypothesis This paper sought to explore how interdisciplinary teaching system relates to interdisciplinary competence of engineering graduates. We specifically examined the connections between interdisciplinary teaching system including comprehensive curriculum emphasis and student-centered instructional practices, and interdisciplinary competence. Also, we explored the influence mechanism by introducing the theory of identity to discuss the mediating effects of interdisciplinary identity, which meant the ways in which students described themselves and were positioned by others in the role of being an interdisciplinary researcher. And we further explored the mediating effects of the three components of interdisciplinary identity, including interest, recognition, and performance.

Design/Method The study used a survey sample of 310 graduate students in 3 High-level Research Universities in china. Using linear modeling, we investigated the relationships among course teaching on graduates’ reports of interdisciplinary competence and explore the mediating effects of interdisciplinary identity.

Results This study found that: (1) Student-centered instructional practices, as well as Comprehensive Curriculum Emphasis, which focused on interdisciplinary content such as core engineering thinking and board perspectives, had a significant role in promoting the interdisciplinarity of engineering graduate students. And Student-centered teaching methods had a more significant effect on improving students' interdisciplinary ability than content design. (2) The recognition of interdisciplinary identity played a partially mediating role between interdisciplinary teaching system and interdisciplinary competence, and the performance dimension had the strongest mediating effect. (3) Student-centered instructional practices had a stronger impact than comprehensive curriculum emphasis on engineering students' interdisciplinary identity, especially on the recognition dimension.

Conclusions The study pointed to the critical role of interdisciplinary teaching system in promoting engineering students’ interdisciplinary competence by building their interdisciplinary identities. Based on the above, this paper suggested that, in the practice of interdisciplinary education reform, the design of student-centered teaching methods should be strengthened, and the construction of interdisciplinary identity of engineering graduate students should be continuously stimulated from the three parts of interest stimulation, recognition support, and performance feedback. It is hoped that future studies could continue to explore how to increase the certain dimension of interdisciplinary identity, whether there were interactions among three dimensions of identity, and whether their interacting level would influence the students’ interdisciplinary competence.