Evaluation will be aligned with the overall learning outcomes – how students and teachers develop and internalize interdisciplinary competence and its subskills – but also with how we succeed with building a culture, with dissemination, and with education research projects.
Progress
Progress will be compared with a first-year baseline and evaluated along several axes for students, teachers, leadership, and stakeholders addressing, for instance:
- Interdisciplinary competence through interviews, surveys, standardized assessments, and rubrics
- Motivation and attitudes through interviews and surveys
- Long-term impact through longitudinal studies
- Adaptation through changes in strategies, regulations, study plans, and learning outcomes
- Culture and dissemination through interviews and outcome measures
Adjust activities
The evaluations will be used to adjust the center's activities. To give an example, we will record the number of students and teachers from various disciplines who participate in activities and adjust the activities to target underrepresented groups. The evaluation framework will be closely coordinated with the education research activity – indeed many of the studies will be done by education researchers – and administered by the leadership group with oversight from the advisory board.
Qualitative studies
The development of interdisciplinary and collaborative competencies from a first-year baseline will be studied in interviews with students, teachers, and leadership. In addition, we will study the impact of specific interventions, such as interdisciplinary sessions, courses or programs, on collaborative competencies.
We will adapt and introduce surveys and assessments from the Kaleidoscope project1 and integrate assessments of interdisciplinary competence in courses and sessions. Rubrics will be adapted and used to assess interdisciplinary competence in student writing in for example reflection notes, essays, and projects from interdisciplinary courses in the honors programs (e.g., HON1000), in the computational science program (e.g., FYS3150), and other programs (e.g., FYS1035). Rubrics and assessments will be adapted and tested for a Norwegian (or Nordic) context. In the pilot-evaluate-scale model, teachers must be involved in research and evaluation processes, which they may be unfamiliar with. We will therefore, together with the CTLs, help the involved teachers and develop a guide that is adapted to the traditions of various disciplines. Our goal is for assessments to be an integrated part of educational development.
Education research group
A solid education research group is essential to understanding, adapting and continually improving our activities, to build a research-based foundation for approaches and to disseminate results. We will therefore establish a group consisting of Prof. M. Sutphen (education research), Asc. Prof. T. Odden (science education research) and a postdoc (Postdoc1) with support of international collaborators Prof. P. Felten, Elon Univ., Georgina Born, Oxford, and Prof. M. Wolfensberger, Hanze Univ.