How students experience and perceive interdisciplinary collaboration: implications for scaffolding interdisciplinary learning processes

The integration of interdisciplinarity in engineering education is rapidly advancing, acknowledging the need for future engineers to be able to collaborate across disciplines to develop solutions to complex, societal challenges. Due to the complexities of interdisciplinary collaboration, engineering students often struggle with these processes. Here, we investigate how students perceive and experience interdisciplinary collaborations and what implications this may have for scaffolding interdisciplinary learning processes. We find six important themes regarding how students perceive and experience interdisciplinary teamwork: (1) Establishing common ground for constructive collaboration, (2) Communication is key to handling conflicts, (3) The case sets the stage for (disciplinary) participation, (4) Collaborations with external partners shape the project, (5) Attitudes towards the course change over time, and (6) Students’ self-reported interdisciplinary learning gains. From these, we derive implications for scaffolding interdisciplinary learning processes, underlining the importance of supporting the teamwork process, particularly in the early stages.