Exploring the impact of disciplinary context on students’ dynamic transfer of learning when addressing problems that apply the first law of thermodynamics

ABSTRACT

A widespread call has been made to develop and support more integrated approaches to STEM education. The first law of thermodynamics serves as a guiding principle for the crosscutting concept of energy and matter. A qualitative interview study was undertaken to support integrated approaches to STEM education by exploring how chemistry, physics, and engineering students (n = 40) transfer first law concepts across disciplinary contexts. Acquired interview data were analysed through the lens of the dynamic transfer framework to reveal the underlying contextual elements students used to know with. Emergent trends across the disciplines revealed how these applied reasoning approaches and epistemologies were realised by each discipline. Productive transfer is shown to be facilitated by the coordination of different disciplinary epistemologies. Suggestions are made to practitioners on how to support students in applying different reasoning approaches when addressing first law problems. The applied methods also serve as a promising methodology for future investigation of students’ transfer of crosscutting concepts.

KEYWORDS:

• Crosscutting concepts
• epistemology
• interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary/convergent

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Holloway, Dr. Thomas Holme, and Dr. N. Sanjay Rebello for serving as grant advisory board members on this NSF-funded project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics statement

This study was approved for implementation (IRB-2020-1265) by the Institutional Review Board at the university where the study was conducted.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under DUE Grant #: 1948981.