“When do students succeed?” Assessing interdisciplinary understanding in PPE papers
Students of the PPE interdisciplinary program at Utrecht University must develop interdisciplinary understanding. This can be defined as the capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines to produce a cognitive advancement, in ways that would have been unlikely through single disciplinary means (Mansilla, 2005). However, little knowledge exists on the particular challenges faced by students integrating insights from our core disciplines: philosophy, politics, economics, and history. In the previous year it has proven difficult to reliably assess interdisciplinary understanding in our bachelor program, especially the final phase of Repko’s approach: integration (Repko & Szostak 2016). The dearth of teaching materials for PPE further complicates this situation. Our study focuses on assessment of integration in the Capstone course (year 2) in which students need to write an interdisciplinary paper. We will develop, implement and evaluate a rubric for assessing interdisciplinary
