Interdisciplinarity in the Basic Science Course
"Interdisciplinarity in the Basic Science Course" - [8.1Mb]
Specialerapport. IND's studenterserie Nr. 58.
Ida Viola Kalmark Andersen, august 2017.
Vejleder: Jesper Bruun
Abstract
In recent years cross-cutting skills have been emphasized as important in school curricula. One approach in teaching such skills is to introduce interdisciplinary teaching methods in the school programs. In 2004 a compulsory integrated science course was introduced in the most popular Danish upper secondary school programs (Stx). This course was called the Basic Science Course (BSC). One of the objectives for the BSC was to increase the collaboration between the science disciplines by requiring the different science disciplines to work together in an interdisciplinary fashion.
This thesis explores the interdisciplinarity of the BSC in three different aspects of the curricula; the intended curriculum was studied through official curriculum documents, the implemented curriculum by classroom observations and interviews with teachers and the real-ized curriculum through observations of the BSC exam situation.
For all three curricula, network analysis in various forms was used for a visual and quantitative analysis of the qualitative data. New variants of both linguistic and action networks were developed in order to investigate the interdisciplinarity of the BSC. In addition, the networks were expanded to also investigate the focus on the learning aims in the three curricula.
Although interdisciplinarity was a requirement in the curriculum documents, the network analysis showed no overwhelming focus on interdisciplinarity in the intended curriculum. In the implemented curriculum, the dominating trend was a pluridisciplinary degree of interdisciplinarity where the disciplines work in parallel rather than as a cooperation on a common topic. The study of the realized cur-riculum indicated that the BSC exams may be of both pluridisciplinary and (true) interdisciplinary character. However, as this part was a proof of concept study of only two exam situations, more data needs to be analyzed in order to demonstrate a clear trend.
In this study, the various forms of network analysis showed to be an advantageous method when used to describe and analyze the in-terdisciplinarity and learning aims of the intended, the implemented and realized curriculum of the BSC program. These various forms of network analysis provide a new way to investigate curriculum alignment.