Design principles-based activities and assignments to enhance undergraduates’ interdisciplinary learning

Engaging undergraduate students in interdisciplinary learning (i.e., integrating disciplines to solve problems or create novel insights) is crucial for equipping them to tackle complex, real-world problems. Despite the importance, limited empirical research has studied how to design activities and assignments to foster undergraduates’ interdisciplinary learning. To address the gap, we synthesized four design principles (i.e., authentic scenarios, boundary-crossing between disciplines, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cognitive advancement) by drawing on critical characteristics of interdisciplinary learning to guide the design of interdisciplinary learning activities and assignments. Through a quasi-experiment, we evaluated the effectiveness of the design by examining the interdisciplinary learning quality demonstrated in the weekly posts (i.e., notes posted on a digital collaborative platform Miro) and final essays of students in the experimental (principle-based design) and comparison conditions (routine design). We found that the online posts and essays of the experimental condition showed greater levels of diversity and integration; online posts of the experimental condition showed significantly greater disciplinary grounding than those in the comparison condition; essays of the experimental condition showed greater cognitive advancement, suggesting the effects of the design. Weekly feedback suggested that participants in the experimental condition provided more positive responses and offered more suggestions to increase engagement, interaction and conceptual understanding. This study contributes to the field by synthesizing actionable design principles and providing empirical evidence for the effectiveness while underscoring the need to improve the integration dimension further.