Collaborative student projects across classrooms and disciplines: How to foster academic skills through shared experience

Posted September 8, 2022

Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts in which past LEAP Action Grant recipients report on their projects.
Dr. Ralph Hale is Assistant Professor of Psychological Science.
Dr. Valerie Surrett is Assistant Professor of English.

Overview: Cross-disciplinary student projects are effective in transforming student attitudes, incentivizing hard work, and enhancing learning. For this project, students in an upper-level special topics course on human memory (PSYC4403) were divided into "Research Teams" that designed futuristic memory replacement systems (MRSs), and students in an English composition course (ENGL1102) were divided into "Journalism Teams" that wrote editorials about the MRSs, translating science for a general audience. These classes met at different times in different buildings, so all interactions and collaborations between classes occurred virtually and often asynchronously.

The idea for this project came about as a result of our shared interest in fostering more interaction between disciplines. Coincidentally, our research interests overlap quite a bit as well: a psychology professor who studies sensory systems and memory – and an English professor interested in literature related to cyborgs and the human body. We applied for a LEAP Action Grant to help us undertake this collaborative effort involving two of our classes – two classes that typically would have very little in common and certainly would not interact with one another. The project underscored the possibility, and perhaps even the necessity, of developing partnerships and communication channels between disciplines. Students demonstrated awareness of real-world implications of academic work and viewed their projects from outside their disciplines. This post will focus on the development of academic skills and emphasize how these

benefits can be obtained through many cross-disciplinary pairings.

Empirical support:

• Cross-disciplinary student projects have been shown to be an effective method of…
  • …incentivizing hard work (Chiriac, 2014)
  • …transforming student attitudes (Little & Hoel, 2011)
  • …enhancing learning (Blumenfeld et al., 1996)
  • …improving self-efficacy (Schaffer et al., 2012)
• Cross-disciplinary projects have been successfully tested in a wide array of pairings including…
  • …business administrating and accounting (Kruck & Teer, 2009)
  • …environmental science and business (Little & Hoel, 2011)
  • …marketing and engineering (McKeage et al., 1999)
  • …music and biology (Burrack & McKenzie, 2005)

Journal-to-journalism project: Each Research Team (Memory class) had to design an MRS based on current research. Then the design had to be explained in detail to the corresponding Journalism Team (English class). Research Teams wrote an extensive research proposal and then presented it virtually to be viewed by both classes. They then formally reflected on the project as a group. Journalism Teams had to convert the MRS design into an editorial explaining the system and its potential implications to a general audience. They also presented their final editorials and reflected on the project at large. Both teams worked together throughout the semester by asking many questions, providing constant clarification, and completing multiple revisions, thereby enhancing the content of their respective products.

Source: phdcomics.com