Excerpt from The Ritz Herald story: A recent study, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and appearing in the Journal of Higher Education, reveals how undergraduate students engage with interdisciplinary learning throughout their college careers and beyond—and how universities should respond to support such learning.
The number of interdisciplinary undergraduate programs has grown rapidly over the past few decades, and federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy have responded by creating new funding opportunities for interdisciplinary initiatives.
“However,” write the authors, “scant research has explored how students experience and navigate interdisciplinarity.” We quite literally don’t know how undergraduate students make sense of their interdisciplinary programs.
To bridge this gap, the research team decided to study students in UMass Amherst’s Integrated Concentration in STEM (iCons) program, a certificate program devoted to solving real-world problems in biomedicine and renewable energy, and which is open to all students in STEM and business fields.
“No previous study has investigated the perceptions of the students themselves,” says Scott Auerbach, professor of chemistry at UMass Amherst and the Mahoney Family Sponsored executive director of the iCons program. “Our new findings suggest how to design programs that meet student needs in a world that demands more interdisciplinary workers to tackle problems in clean energy, public health, and climate change.”
Read the full story from The Ritz Herald.
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