Interdisciplinary Curriculum Evaluation Research

In order for our nation to remain competitive in the future, engineering higher education must address rapidly changing industrial needs in a timely fashion. Thus it is important that, in addition to fundamental teaching and research, abilities such as higher-order thinking (creativity, problem solving, and critical thinking) and motivation are fostered, since these are the abilities which are critical for achieving the goals of enhancing interdisciplinary engineering abilities and promoting students' innovation and research and development capabilities, thereby ensuring employability and competitiveness. Interdisciplinary project-based learning (IPBL) was selected as the instruction strategy for this project to develop innovative teaching approaches in engineering education. Apply the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA) to analyze the effectiveness of instruction strategies, and then provide feedback for improvement. Hope to enhance the learning motivation and creativity of engineering students. The entire project is divided into 6 sub-project, in order to ensure the quality and instructional effectiveness of the other 5 sub-projects, this sixth sub-project will include the following objectives: (1) curriculum development, providing educational workshops and counseling professors in this project to integrate interdisciplinary and innovative teaching approaches into the field of engineering; (2) during all stages of curriculum development, a variety of tools will be used for the immediate evaluation of the curriculum development process, including the suitability of curriculum planning and diagnosis of curriculum implementation problems in order to provide clear direction for the project.
As for the research methods, a quasi-experimental approach will be adopted to evaluate the differences between instructional strategies, the independent variable (second year instruction vs. third year instruction), in terms of the dependent variables of learning motivation and creativity. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), by controlling for the influences of pre-test scores, will be used to effectively examine and quantify the impact of second year vs. third year instruction on the dependent variables. The results present that the effectiveness of third year instruction is better than that of second year instruction. According to the research results of the previous two years, this sixth sub-project develop an interdisciplinary course “Design Thinking in Education” for a total of 3 weeks. A total of 23 students from 10 different departments participate this course. This course separates students into several groups with different departments for promoting the learning Environment of interactive discussion, hands-on instruction, brainstorming, and selfinitiated exploration in groups. The goal of this course is to enhance students’ creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration, problem solving. We hope to develop the interdisciplinary course for a single faculty of college in the future, and achieve the goals of multiple and selfregulated learning. The contributions of this study include the creation of empirically validated and effective approaches for integrating IPBL in engineering education, practical and replicable guidelines for promoting higher-order thinking and learning motivation for engineering colleges in Taiwan. Professors from each sub-project have published four conference papers in cooperation. Research results will be published in international journals in June.