Educational Research in Educational Innovations to Stimulate Adaptive Performance

The research project is about educating students as change agents, enabling them to take up grand societal challenges. For this, students need to develop adaptive expertise – the ability to perform at a high level in challenging situations. Being exposed to multiple perspectives can help developing adaptive expertise – which is the case in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork. Whereas interdisciplinarity refers to the integration of different bodies of knowledge, transdisciplinarity refers to interaction between students and non-academic actors. We lack empirical evidence for how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork impacts students’ adaptive expertise and solid measurements of adaptive expertise that can be used in education. In the research project, we tackle both issues by addressing the research question: How does transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in teamwork impact students’ adaptive expertise development? We defined two work packages. In WP1, we create design scenarios for measuring adaptive expertise by using artificial intelligence. In WP2, we investigate the impact of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork on adaptive expertise in challenge-based learning courses along two dimensions: (1) proximity and (2) process. We use the cosine similarity measure and a dashboard to track the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborative efforts of the team.

The project will kick-off in September and run for two years. It will result in scientific articles and innovative assessment tools that can be used in education. Do you have any questions or are you interested in the project? Then please don’t hesitate to reach out to Yvette (Yvette.baggen@wur.nl).