Towards an assessment of students’ interdisciplinary competence in middle school science

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary approach is viewed as the best way to learn about and perceive complex scientific phenomena in the real world; therefore, students need to develop interdisciplinary habits of mind in K-12 science education. This article provided a framework for understanding middle school students’ interdisciplinary competence that included four dimensions, each with three performance levels. Science educators have claimed that the current assessment system is still oriented towards single discipline-based science learning. Therefore, this study presented a validated instrument based on our multidimensional construct to explore students’ interdisciplinary competence. The participants in this study were 385 9th graders in Henan Province in China. Multidimensional Rasch analysis suggested that this measure had satisfactory reliability and validity. All the students demonstrated the basic level of ability for each dimension. More competent science learners were found to achieve higher ability levels. In addition, students with different scientific proficiencies underperformed in different dimensions. Implications and suggestions for interdisciplinary science teaching and assessment were also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Interdisciplinary learning
• interdisciplinary competence
• middle school
• science education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is the result work on a project (17JJD880007) funded by the MOE Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education from East China Normal University.