Interdisciplinarity

TAY En Rong Stephen¹ and LIU Mei Hui^2
1Department of the Built Environment, College of Design and Engineering (CDE)
²Department of Food Science & Technology, College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS)

¹stephen.tay@nus.edu.sg, ²fstlmh@nus.edu.sg

 

Tay, E. R. S., & Liu, M. H. (2023). Exploratory implementation of scenario-based student-generated questions for students from the humanities and sciences in a scientific inquiry course [Paper presentation]. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2023, 7 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecc2023proceedings/exploratory-implementation-of-scenario-based-student-generated-questions-for-students-from-the-humanities-and-sciences-in-a-scientific-inquiry-course/

 

SUB-THEME

Interdisciplinarity and Education 

 

KEYWORDS

Interdisciplinarity, peer learning, student-generated questions, assessment, feedback

 

CATEGORY

Paper Presentation 

 

INTRODUCTION

Students in the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS) are required to undertake courses to fulfil the Scientific Inquiry II (SI2) requirement. With the success of scenario-based student generated-questions (sb-SGQ) reported previously across three courses within the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) (Du & Tay, 2022; Tay, 2022), the sb-SGQ approach was adopted in the course HSI2007 “Deconstructing Food”, which fulfils the SI2 requirement by CHS. The sb-SGQ builds upon student-generated questions (SGQ) (Rosenshine et al., 1996) through the incorporation of real-life examples from industry for authentic assessment (Wiggins, 1990). The aim was to encourage interdisciplinary learning, which involves integrating knowledge from various disciplines to specific problems (Ivanitskaya et al., 2002) among students from both the Humanities and Sciences taking HSI2007. Hence, this study aims to answer the following questions:

 

1. Does the approach encourage interdisciplinary learning?
2. What are the student perceptions towards the use of sb-SGQ?

 

METHODOLOGY

The sb-SGQ was implemented as an ungraded activity in Semester 2 of AY2022/23, with the timeline of the implementation shown in Table 1. Participation to the survey is voluntary and does not impact student’s grades. Data was subsequently analysed using JASP, an open-source statistical package (Love et al., 2019) with a significance level of 5%.

 

Table 1
Implementation schedule of sb-SGQ

Week	1	5	7 and 9	10	11
Activity	Inform students of sb-SGQ	Provide guidance on sb-SGQ	Students generate sb-SGQ and upload to Canvas. Selected cases were discussed in tutorials.	Graduate tutors provide feedback for sb-SGQ on Canvas.	Perception survey shared with students

 

RESULTS

Through the sb-SGQ, we observed that students were able to develop questions that demonstrate the use of content knowledge across different instructional weeks. In the example below, students asked how one could identify organic/eco-friendly labels to make choices on sustainable food products (Figure 1). This question demonstrates the application of concepts taught in Week 6 (on food labels) and Week 8 (on food sustainability).

 

 

Interestingly, the group’s corresponding answer to the sb-SGQ (refer to Figure 2) demonstrated further integration of topics taught in Weeks 2 (on the use of reputable sources of information) and 4 (on product shelf-life). Importantly, interdisciplinary thinking from areas such as environmental sciences, psychology, and marketing were also present in the answer.

 

Students’ responses to the survey questions are shown in Table 2. Generally, students from the Humanities and Sciences expressed positive responses, defined by a score above 3 in a 5-point Likert scale, for all five questions. Students from the Sciences provided a higher average response for all five questions, of which Q4 was statistically significant (p = 0.003) when using a one-tailed test. This could be attributed to a higher affinity by students from the Sciences towards question generation, which involves scientific inquiry, a skill students from the Sciences may be more accustomed to.

 

Table 2
Average of student responses in Semester 2 based on a 5-point Likert scale. 

Group	Q1: The collective sb-SGQ developed by the class has helped me to better understand the concepts taught.	Q2: The skills acquired in the sb-SGQ exercise are transferrable skills (i.e. skills that can be used/applied in other roles or settings).	Q3: The sb-SGQ assignment was sufficiently challenging.	Q4: I enjoyed the sb-SQG process.	Q5: I would recommend the use of sb-SGQ for future modules.
Humanities (n = 59)	3.763	3.797	3.847	3.390	3.576
Sciences (n = 60)	4.017	3.967	3.783	3.717	3.700

 

Subsequently, qualitative feedback was analysed (refer to Table 3). Generally, students from the Humanities and Sciences were able to appreciate how the sb-SGQ allowed them to relate the course learning objectives with real-world examples. Students also appreciated peer learning in the sb-SGQ exercise, both from within and beyond the groups, which raised different perspectives. A Humanities student shared how the sb-SGQ made the student comfortable with scientific research (Comment 1 in Table 3). Another student shared how he/she was able to apply knowledge gained from another course into HSI2007, which highlighted the possibility of interdisciplinary learning when students employ elements from other courses (Comment 7 in Table 3). What was interesting was the comment by a student expressing how the sb-SGQ approach helps with his/her plans to be an educator in the future (Comment 10 in Table 3), which implies an independent agreement from the student on the pedagogical effectiveness of the sb-SGQ approach.

 

The comments provided in Table 3 highlight that 1) students from the Humanities can be comfortable with scientific research, a domain commonly perceived to be a strength of students from the Sciences (Comment 1 in Table 3), and 2) how students are able to organically retrieve information from other courses and apply them when given the opportunity to do so (Comment 7 in Table 3).

 

Table 3
Student feedback from HSI2007 on the sb-SGQ. Feedback reproduced as they were received.

Group	Feedback
Humanities	1. It got me comfortable with doing scientific research for food related topics. 2. It was an interesting experience as to craft out an answer, one needs to take the initiative to plan out steps one should take to generate the answer and also put in the work to get the answer. 3. It motivated me to be on track with my classroom learning and apply it to real world scenarios. Collaborating with group mates to finish it made the process very insightful as we all brought different points to the table. 4. In generating my sb-SGQ, it was interesting to see linkages between the content learnt and how it is related to real-world scenarios. It was also a fun process to recap on knowledge learnt.
Science	5. Coming up with the scenario required us to recollect concepts that we had learnt in the module and craft according to them. This helped in further strengthening our contextual understanding. 6. It was deeply insightful and helped to expand my horizons. 7. I wanted to apply what I have learned in HSI2007 and FST1101B. Previously during one of the FST1101B tutorials, I learned about labeling on food packaging. Hence, the task proposed by HSI2007 felt somewhat similar and I was able to recall what I have previously learned from another module and transfer this knowledge here. 8. I feel like the sb-SGQ helps me to discover my interest in certain food topics and the generation of the questions and its corresponding answers makes me more knowledgable in that area and pushes me to ask more question. This helps me build a passion for learning and my thirst for knowledge. 9. My group mates and I had quite a lot of fun searching up cases and generating questions for them. 10. I aspire to be a teacher in the future and I feel sb-SGQ is useful for my professional development as it constantly pushes me to ask questions and find answers for it. This helps to cultivate my love for learning and makes me more interested to learn about new things as well as to ask questions when I am in doubt.

 

CONCLUSION AND SIGNIFICANCE

The sb-SGQ approach was employed in HSI2007 with students from both the Humanities and Sciences in HSI2007 to encourage interdisciplinary learning. Though a comparison with a control cohort without the sb-SGQ approach was not possible, as the HSI2007 course started with the sb-SGQ approach, a critical analysis of the data collected revealed valuable insights. Generally, there was positive student feedback evidenced from qualitative and quantitative data. The significance of this study lies in the lack of hardware and software costs in the sb-SGQ, which aids with the implementation of the sb-SGQ not only for this course, but potentially for other courses as well. In addition, data from this study suggests the possibility of sb-SGQ to encourage interdisciplinary learning, which can be further investigated in future runs of the course.

 

 

REFERENCES

Du, H., & Tay, E. R. S. (2022). Using scenario-based student-generated questions to improve the learning of engineering mechanics: A case study in civil engineering. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2022, 7-8 December, National University of Singapore. https://nus.edu.sg/cdtl/docs/default-source/engagement-docs/conferences/hecc2022/ebooklet.pdf

Ivanitskaya, L., Clark, D., Montgomery, G., & Primeau, R. (2002). Interdisciplinary learning: Process and outcomes. Innovative Higher Education, 27(2), 95-111. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021105309984

Love, J., Selker, R., Marsman, M., Jamil, T., Dropmann, D., Verhagen, J., Ly, A., Gronau, Q. F., Šmíra, M., & Epskamp, S. (2019). JASP: Graphical statistical software for common statistical designs. Journal of Statistical Software, 88(2), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v088.i02

Rosenshine, B., Meister, C., & Chapman, S. (1996). Teaching students to generate questions: A review of the intervention studies. Review of Educational Research, 66(2), 181-221. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543066002181

Tay, E. R. S. (2022). Efficacy of scenario‐based student-generated questions in an online environment during COVID-19 across two modules. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2022, 7-8 December, National University of Singapore. https://nus.edu.sg/cdtl/docs/default-source/engagement-docs/conferences/hecc2022/ebooklet.pdf

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, 2(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.7275/ffb1-mm19