Many universities throughout North America have started specialized programs that attempt to teach science as a single subject, rather than as individual disciplines. There are two things that motivate such an approach: 1) It helps students break down the barriers in thinking that prevent them from taking knowledge in one subject and transferring it to another and 2) it potentially makes a student’s knowledge more robust.<br/><br/>While there exist many discipline-specific surveys that measure student attitudes (e.g. CLASS-Phys, CLASS-Chem, CLASS-Bio), none exist that can appropriately quantify interdisciplinary attitudes that students may possess. To address this need, we have developed an interdisciplinary survey (InterCLASS) to probe student attitudes about the connections between biology, chemistry and physics. The questions come in two distinct types: 1) discipline-linked questions asking students about relationships between two disciplines (e.g. “examples and concepts from physics are important when learning chemistry”) and 2) specific and targeted questions relating to interdisciplinary learning (e.g. “I find the overlap between the different branches of science interesting”). The survey is short – 10 questions in total – and is meant to be offered with other attitudinal surveys that are commonly offered to students.<br/><br/>In this presentation I will discuss the overall development cycle of InterCLASS, including highlights from the pilot offering, focus groups and expert validation steps. In the Fall of 2015 the first large scale distribution of the instrument was offered to 1500 students across all disciplines in first-year science at the University of British Columbia. The initial analysis of this data will be discussed.

Developing an instrument to assess student attitudes towards interdisciplinary learning

251st National Meeting (2016)

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