Investigating How Undergraduate Students Use Their Understanding of Conservation of Energy across the Disciplines of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering

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This project seeks to serve the national interest by enhancing our understanding of how undergraduate STEM education may be better integrated across disciplines. College courses are traditionally separated by discipline. In contrast, the STEM workforce requires collaboration to enable professionals with expertise in different disciplines to solve interdisciplinary problems. To gain insight on how to promote interdisciplinary collaboration, the project will study how college students develop and use their understanding of conservation of energy across the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and engineering. Student interviews and classroom observations will be collected and analyzed to discover how different disciplinary contexts may support or hinder students’ ability to apply ideas learned in one discipline to a different discipline. In addition, the project will explore the strategies students use to solve such problems. Finally, the results of the research will be used to develop guidelines that instructors can use to assist students in developing an interdisciplinary understanding of energy concepts.This project will study the cognitive resources that Purdue University students use to address problems involving the first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy. The research will leverage Knowledge In Pieces and Dynamic Transfer frameworks to study students’ horizontal transfer of first law concepts across chemistry, engineering, and physics courses. “Familiar contexts” will be defined by the disciplinary course in which a student is currently enrolled. The research objectives are to: (1) identify the cognitive resources students activate when addressing first law energy transfer problems inside and outside familiar disciplinary contexts; (2) compare and contrast the resources students use across the three disciplines, as well as across lower and upper division courses in chemistry, physics and engineering; and (3) determine how students’ abilities to solve first law problems inside and outside familiar disciplinary contexts differ between lower division and upper division courses. To accomplish these objectives, the project team will collect classroom observations and conduct think-aloud problem-solving interviews with STEM majors enrolled in the courses. For the interviews, the team will develop sets of disciplinary first law problems that represent the same base conceptual problems with contexts relevant to chemistry, physics, or engineering. The variation in context for each prompt will be accomplished by using discipline-specific systems, language, and notation. During the interviews, STEM majors will be asked to address an in-discipline prompt and an out-of-discipline prompt and to compare the two prompts in a scaffolded transfer phase. Classroom observations in each course will inform the themes derived from the interview analyses and allow hypotheses to be made regarding connections between student reasoning and teaching practices. Results will be disseminated in scholarly publications and at national meetings. In addition, the team will use the findings to develop interdisciplinary guidelines for STEM instructors that will be disseminated via networking workshops to support practitioners in developing tailored instructional materials for energy and matter concepts in their courses. The success of the project will be evaluated by an external advisory board. The project has the potential to contribute to the STEM community by identifying the effects of disciplinary instruction on student understanding of the first law of thermodynamics and documenting the types of productive resources and strategies students use to effectively cross disciplinary boundaries. In addition, it will generate guidelines for STEM educators to promote interdisciplinary understanding of energy. This project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, implementation of and research on promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.