Conclusions

As background to this discussion, readers may want to study my detailed reflection on outcomes in Fall 1999 and Spring 2000 and Fall 2000. The conclusions below summarize these results.

Summary of results of quantitative instruments and comparison of my students to national profiles: our students perform at lower levels than national norms. Challenges for constructing courses that demand higher order levels of integration.

Extent to which students in IDST 2310 exhibit the outcomes associated with interdisciplinary courses. Our outcomes consistent with outcomes associated with IDST in the literature; gains on domains of the MER as compared to basic personality traits on the JPI profiles.

Profiles of "A" students. Profiles in early iterations of the course suugested a need to revise the course to demand more independent thought and integration.

Subsequent revisions of course to demand more higher order thinking and impact on student learning. Revisions promote more integration but cause greater difficulties for students in performance.

Reflections on student surveys: To what did students attribute the outcomes associated with interdisciplinary courses? Remarks on the impact of active and collaborative learning and global perspective of the course Students tended to identify IDST courses with active and collaborative learning, and development of a broader, more global perspective.

Conflicting ways of knowing and learning outcomes. The greatest learning tended to occur from the students' standpoint when conflicting ways of knowing were juxtaposed through active and collaborative learning assignments.

Summary. Interdisciplinary perspectives themselves do not account for many of the outcomes charted in the literature, but rather must be combined with creative pedagogy and designed so that students can work from their comfort zones when confronting examples of cognitive dissonance.

The results of the students' JPIs and MERs provide a profile of the student body in my IDST 2310 Fine and Applied Arts course from fall 1999-summer 2001. As seen from the class means on the JPI in fall 1999, spring 2000, fall 2000, and spring 2001, the students at GC&SU in this core course tend to fall in the low range compared to national norms on the analytical cluster, breadth of interest, tolerance of diverse ideas, and in the high ranges on adherence to traditional values. They also tend to score in the high ranges on anxiety. The MER results show a similar profile; the mean domain scores of students in this core course in the fall 1999, spring 2000 and later terms tend to fall in the position 1 or 2 range, with occasional scores in domain 3. Positions 1 and 2 tend to reflect a dualistic, black/white, right/wrong approach to the world and learning contexts, and reliance upon external authorities whose veracity may not be yet subject to critical evaluation.

These factors provide an especially challenging background on which to build an interdisciplinary course such as the Fine and Applied Arts in Civilization. Despite the difficulties which might be associated with the learners' profiles, the course definitely produces the outcomes associated with interdisciplinary courses in the literature. These outcomes include the development of greater critical abilities, greater empathy for ethical, social, and other issues, greater ability to tolerate ambiguity, the ability to tolerate diverse perspectives, the ability to synthesize or integrate these diverse perspectives, enlarged perspectives or horizons, more creative, original or unconventional thinking, more humility or listening skills, and sensitivity to bias.(1)

On the student surveys in fall 1999, when asked to define an interdisciplinary course on the basis of their experiences in the Fine and Applied Arts course, students often remarked that the course helped them to develop enhanced perspectives on issues studied, including a deeper appreciation for the complexity and open-endedness of issues, appreciation for global perspectives and interest in cultural differences; according to the fall 1999 surveys, students also perceived the course to have developed their abilities to think independently. These statements on the end-of-the-term surveys were also corroborated by student performance on exams, projects, and other class activities as well as on the MER post-test. Fifteen of the twenty-six students who took the MER pre- and post-tests made gains on their scores in domain 1 over the course of the semester; the mean increase of these students was 1.13, a very significant gain representing movement from one position to the next. This domain deals with awareness and evaluation of multiple alternatives. Students also made gains on domains 5 and 6, which deal with the nature of knowledge, how it is evaluated and who evaluates it (see also the scores of individual students whose post-test scores increased on domain 5 and domain 6). The gains shown on the post-tests in domains 1, 5 and 6 indicate great success in terms of developing the abilities crucial to an interdisciplinary approach, especially with regard to outcomes emphasized in the literature, such as greater tolerance of ambiguity and diverse perspectives. (Given these tremendous gains on the MER domains, I regret that I could not administer pre- and post-tests to the students in my spring 2000, fall 2000, and spring 2001, and Maymester 2001 sections. My failure to do so was largely a matter of funding; the cost of evaluating these instruments was $20 per student per term for the pre- and post-tests.)

Most importantly, the information indicated in the MER post-tests and the student surveys was also corroborated in many cases by student work. Student 20 in fall 1999, for example, made gains in all areas of the MER on the post-test; she also reported having her perspectives broadened, and although her score on the JPI in breadth of interest and tolerance of diverse perspectives was very low, she wrote on more nonwestern cultures than any other student on the final. Several other students performed well in the course during various terms, including many students whose scores on the JPI analytical cluster were extraordinarily low. Students 13 and 14 from fall 2000, for example, consistently performed well on exams and other projects requiring the integration of several disciplinary resources (see the midterm I exam of student 13 and 14, and their self-portrait projects: student 13 and student 14).

On one level, these results and positive outcomes strongly corroborate the 1992 research of A.W. Astin, who charted the impact of interdisciplinary learning in his What Matters in College? Four Critical Years Revisited. Astin noted the effects of interdisciplinary work on cognitive and academic development, disciplinary and general knowledge, critical thinking, GPA, preparation for graduate and professional school, degree aspirations, intellectual self-concept, performance on MCAT, LSAT, NTE examinations, and self-reported growth measures with the exception of job skills and foreign language. In this study, he argued that for courses in areas other than interdisciplinary studies, active learning, interactions with peers, student-orientation of faculty, and pedagogy proved to have the most impact on students; in interdisciplinary courses, on the other hand, the interdisciplinarity alone of the courses seemed to account for many of the benefits charted, including impact on his twenty-two general education outcomes.

However, the cognitive gains that can be demonstrated in my course in the fall 1999 on the MERs and in other semesters on course work were only part of the story. I was also interested in student reactions to and understanding of interdisciplinary contexts. Clearly they gained in the course, but to what did they attribute the gains? Further, I also wondered whether I could directly tie their progress to any specific aspect(s) of the course.

The performance of students such as 13 and 14 from fall 2000, as well as other "A" students from previous semesters, raised some issues of importance for me in evaluating the success of the course and the extent to which the course was truly meeting the ideal outcomes of an interdisciplinary course. Although these students were clearly integrating complex disciplinary materials that often forced an expansion and reappraisal of the meaning of a term such as "color," for example, they were also in many cases succeeding on exams primarily because they were able to master the content presented in class and recapitulate it on exams, rather than because they embarked on an independent analysis. In fact, an analysis of the "A" students in the course from fall 1999-fall 2000 (three semesters) shows that many of the students, a startling eighty-nine percent, scored in the low ranges of the JPI on the analytical cluster. Although exams and other assignments required complex interdisciplinary work, the course often focused on providing models of integrative thinking, a context in which students could master them, and required them to demonstrate mastery of materials discussed on exams. Successful students prior to spring 2001 were often able to master the information in the online text or in lecture/discussions and handouts. These students also often scored very low in breadth of interest, tolerance of diverse perspectives, and the analytical cluster. While the course clearly presented alternative viewpoints and various models of integration that students successfully emulated, in fall 1999 and, to a lesser extent in spring and fall 2000, I felt that the exams were not prompting enough independent integration of disparate resources and independent critical analysis of broad course questions. Despite the cognitive gainsmade by several students in fall 1999 and the broader, more global perspectives on issues demonstrated in the course work and survey responses of several students, I felt the course could push them to think more independently.

This and other issues prompted me to redesign the course in stages from spring 2000 through the summer 2001. Among those issues was the fact that students on the fall 1999 end-of-the-term surveys, and indeed on all other course surveys (see the spring 2000 and fall 2000 surveys), consistently failed to accurately define the interdisciplinary method. Just as consistently, the students identified their interdisciplinary course with active learning, a global perspective, and more participatory units (see also the spring 2000 comments on active learning, as well as the fall 2000 comments). I will discuss this issue in more detail below, but let us first discuss the various revisions to the course from spring 2000 through summer 2001 (summer 2001 still under construction).

From spring 2000 through the present iteration, I made various changes in content and structure to enhance the interdisciplinary approach of the course and students' understanding of interdisciplinarity as a method. The unity of the course was enhanced through a progressive refinement of the theme; by spring 2001, the course clearly revolved around the question of "What is Art" with a discussion of the nature of the self as an important subtext. Students in the spring and fall 2000 gave overwhelmingly positive comments on the course's tendency to promote self-knowledge and exploration; in fact, the final unit on the self which involved the creation of a self-portrait along with an analytical essay was the single most successful aspect of the course. It was also the most thoroughly interdisciplinary unit of the course, as it involved disparate disciplinary perspectives such as psychology, literature, religion, music, art, and drama. I also introduced more truly interdisciplinary modules and units, as chronicled on the spring 2000 enactment section.

I also introduced more active and applied learning contexts, including several bulletin board postings in WEBCT designed to force students to apply concepts learned in one discipline to another disciplinary context or to synthesize the material from several disciplines. Students responded very positively to impact of the bulletin board postings on their learning, even though they often remarked on the amount of work required, the inconvenience of using the computer and of the frequent difficulties with the campus network (especially in fall 2000). I also redesigned the exams to require more integration of disciplinary materials and more application of course ideas to new contexts. Grades on the first and second midterms rose in the spring and fall 2000 after the revisions made, as did the class mean final grade (compare to the mean grades from fall 1999). The bulletin board postings also had the advantage of drawing students away from a regurgitation mode of learning and more into an exploratory mode in which they applied ideas from one discipline or group of disciplines to another context (see Pooh's Lesson on Art and the Haiku/Zen Garden assignments for examples).

In the spring 2001, the exams as well as other assignments finally reflected what I thought a good interdisciplinary approach would demand. Students were forced to analyze the aesthetic of functionalism in their creative papers on Egypt; on their first exam, they were asked to analyze a fundamental question about art and to integrate several units of their choice in a way that they could not merely mimic from the online or hard copy textbook chapters or in-class materials. Although students by and large had a much more difficult time on this exam (compare the mean average on exam I spring 2001 to that of fall 2000), those students who did well demonstrated much higher order analytical skills than those demanded on midterms given in earlier semesters.

In some ways, the enhanced demands of the course produced more positive higher-order cognitive results early on; in other ways, the approach of previous semesters, which was to provide various models of integration progressing in stages throughout the course, created a context which allowed a diverse group of students to at least mimic these models before the final project on the self, in which they were forced to do some independent integration. Students whose profiles indicated low analytical skills on the JPI and/or a 1 or 2 on the MER in various domains were better able to handle the step-by-step approach. Those students who excelled on exam I in the spring 2001 had much higher scores on the analytical cluster than the class as a whole, and higher scores than the mean of the "A" students in previous semesters. Further, many of these students, in contrast to the "A" students of previous semesters, already had taken at least one other interdisciplinary course. They were more properly equipped to engage in the higher order intellectual tasks asked of them this semester than students who had not had a previous interdisciplinary experience.

While the various content revisions clearly did have an impact on student learning as reflected in course work, they did not change the responses of students on the end-of-the-semester surveys. My studies, contrary to that of Astin (1992), suggest that pedagogy and global perspective have just as much impact on students in interdisciplinary courses as in courses in traditional disciplines. In fact, pedagogy and global perspective often tended to have a greater immediate impact students' perception of their own cognitive growth than the interdisciplinary method itself. In the surveys I administered from the fall 1999-spring 2001, students consistently reported that the active learning units had the most positive affect on their learning of course content and possible future growth (see fall 1999, spring 2000, and fall 2000). In the course surveys administered during the spring 2000 and fall 2000 semesters, students were asked which of the units or modules they most enjoyed. Students almost universally mentioned the self-portrait project or other associated active learning modules, such as the preferential shapes assignment or the Yoruba ring workshop. When asked to define or describe an interdisciplinary course on the end-of-the-term surveys, over 3/4s of students mentioned active learning and greater interaction between teacher and pupil as a definitive characteristic of an interdisciplinary course rather than the integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives.

Students also tended to respond to the surveys according to their personality traits and/or preferences as indicated by the JPI or their level of cognitive development as indicated on the MER. For example, in the fall 1999 surveys (and others as well) students whose scores on the JPI in breadth and tolerance were very low would often define an interdisciplinary course by its global perspective; several of these students made decisive gains in their breadth of interest, as shown by their choice of course work, or on their scores from the MER pre- to the MER post-test (see the references above, for example, to student 20 from fall 1999). In other words, the aspects of the course that most struck these students were those aspects that were in direct conflict with their native personality traits or their particular level of cognitive development.

In many cases, it was just these aspects of the course that could be tied the most directly to the students' learning outcomes. Many students reported the greatest learning when the course materials included significant portions that built upon areas of previous knowledge or areas of comfort according to their JPI or MER scores but that also juxtaposed these materials with others that were in conflict with one or more of their learning preferences or personality traits. This was especially true with the self-portrait projects, which contained the widest array of disciplinary materials among the course units and which also integrated rational ways of knowing with more empathetic ways of knowing. Students with high degrees of empathy often were prompted to engage and to process very complex analytical models by the active learning context. Alternatively, students whose profiles indicated strong needs for organization and rational ways of knowing often reported being able to really stretch their comfort zone, found in the disciplinary content, through the active learning component of this project, found in the self-portrait they created. Student 18 from fall 1999, for example, had a very high score on the JPI on the organization scale, analytical and dependability clusters; this student also had a very low score on the emotional cluster. He reported having great difficulty on the self-portrait project:

(question 12 fall 1999 survey) I thoroughly enjoyed this class, some of the projects were difficult to accomplish because my mind had never been challenged in that manner before. I am accustomed to education where there is a right and wrong answer and it is easy to achieve the proper answer through studying. When asked to use my mind to make a project of myself, I became confused because I have never used my mind in that manner before. Sitting down and thinking about the project, ideas became clearer and the project became easier to comprehend. Again, it was a very enjoyable class and I feel that I will leave the class with a better understanding of art as well as myself.

However, he managed very nicely the disciplinary materials such as psychological perspectives on the self, Hinduism, and other units on the final exam. Contexts which push the student in new directions seem to be the most successful when students can also build upon areas of greater comfort or previous knowledge. Many students in the course, for example, reported having trouble with the musical components of the elements of art unit because they had no background on which to build. While there were applied projects for the unit on color in the visual arts, there were none for the musical components. An active learning project which integrated these two domains might have improved student learning in many cases.

My research into student learning in the IDST 2310 course suggests that one reason that interdisciplinary courses succeed in producing the strong cognitive benefits charted by A.W. Astin and others is that interdisciplinary courses tend to be taught with more innovative pedagogies, such as active and collaborative learning. They tend to employ global perspectives, as global perspectives naturally contribute to the cognitive dissonance generated by diverse disciplinary perspectives. Since interdisciplinary courses often aim to juxtapose disparate perspectives on a common topic of theme, global perspectives go hand-in-hand with interdisciplinary approaches. My students tended to be more struck by the dissonance created by the global perspectives than by the dissonance created by interdisciplinary perspectives. This may have been partially because the course was basically a narrow interdisciplinary course which dealt with disciplines predominantly in the humanities.

Another reason that interdisciplinary courses may produce the cognitive benefits charted in the literature is that they have a greater tendency to juxtapose a wide array of materials; such a wide array of materials is more likely to both hook into the comfort zones of diverse students as well as to conflict with them in some way. When combined with active and collaborative learning, greater empathy is produced and the level of synthesis is also increased.

Many of my students perceived their interdisciplinary course to be different from courses in traditional disciplines partly because of the many disciplinary perspectives introduced, but largely because of the prominent amount of active learning in the course and the considerable amount of interaction between teacher and pupil. The end-of-the-term surveys I gave over the course of four semesters indicate that students perceived the teaching techniques as the defining feature of their course (see also fall 2000).

My research strongly supports earlier research done on the cognitive impact of interdisciplinary courses, but they add a new dimension to our understanding of why and under what conditions interdisciplinarity produces these affects. The most important insight of my four semesters of research is that pedagogy and global perspectives are as important in producing the cognitive benefits of interdisciplinary courses as interdisciplinarity itself. Astin showed that pedagogy was often more tied to long-term cognitive development than content in disciplinary courses; my research as a a Carnegie scholar suggests that pedagogy and global perspectives may be just as equally responsible for the cognitive benefits associated with interdisciplinary courses. However, interdisciplinary courses may naturally produce more pronounced affects in the long run as they tend to juxtapose ways of knowing which conform to students' comfort zones with those that do not. Further, they tend to require students more often to synthesize these conflicting materials in active learning or other innovative contexts. These aspects of interdisciplinary courses tend to speak strongly to students and to prompt them to increase their level of cognitive development or consider ways of knowing that go beyond their profiles according to the JPI or other standaridzed instruments such as the MER.

ENDNOTES

1. William H. Newell, "Interdisciplinary Curriculum Development," in Issues in Integrative Studies no. 8 (1990) 69-70. Several other authors have written on the outcomes of interdisciplinary education, including Vincent Kavaloski. In his article, "Interdisciplinary Education and Humanistic Aspiration: A Critical Reflection," in Joseph Kockelmans, Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), Kavaloski argues that integration of knowledge, freedom of inquiry, and innovation are important outcomes of an interdisciplinary education. A longitudinal study at St. Olaf's College showed that students in the interdisiplinary program had greater tolerance for ambiguity than their counterparts in traditional majors. See Allen J. David and William H. Newell's "Those Experiential Colleges of the 1960's: Where Are They, Now that We Need Them?," in The Chronicle for Higher Education (November 18, 1981), 64. Reprinted in Stephen H. Barnes, ed., Points of View on American Higher Education, Vol. 2 Institutions and Issues (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990). 38-43.

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