case study about challenges in teaching

Tales from the Trenches

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• Case Teaching
• Perspectives

THE CENTENNIAL OF THE BUSINESS CASE: A 5-PART SERIES

Part 1: Exploring the Relevance and Efficacy of the Case Method 100 Years Later

Part 2: The Heart of the Case Method

Part 3: The Art of the Case Method

Part 4: Tales from the Trenches

Part 5: The Future of the Case Method

THE SERIES TRANSLATED

Access free PDFs of this five-part article series, translated into each of the following languages:

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Overall, however, the similarities in perspectives were more prominent. Our interviewees emphasized the case method’s unique power to engage and deepen active learning for both learners and educators. We consider these themes below as we explore faculty responses to six key questions.

The Initial Draw to Cases

We first asked interviewees to describe their experience with case teaching and how they started teaching with cases. Most of our respondents had some experience with cases when they were students, noting how much they enjoyed them and the experiences that they facilitated.

Ryan Buell: I first encountered cases as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the late 90s and again when I came to Harvard for an MBA in the early 2000s. I fell in love with cases because I found they’re just a more fun, engaging, and I think transformational way to learn.

Meredith Burnett: I have been using the case study approach since 2007 when I was a faculty member at Florida International University. There, I taught HR management students who were enrolled in a graduate program. I loved using the case study approach because it exposed students to a variety of issues that they may face or were facing in the workplace. And the case studies that I used allowed me to fully develop an issue that an organization faced and the challenges that they faced as a result of that particular situation.

Joshua Margolis: I really became a case method teacher back in 1991 when, as a doctoral student, I was going through the first year of the MBA program. And I remember the very first class session with Professor Kaz Mishina in technology and operations management and how he taught the Benihana case and how that came to life on the board and through his energetic discussion leading. And that pulled me into being a case method teacher.

Leon Prieto: The reason I started using cases was to make my lecture more interactive, make it more experiential, and to make the material more meaningful to the students. I didn’t really want to be one of those boring professors who students complain about on Rate My Professor. I really wanted to find ways to make the whole educational process come alive for my students. And I really think the case teaching approach does a good job supplementing the traditional lecture.

Associate Professor Ryan Buell, for instance, referred to when he realized as a student how engaging and transformational cases could be long before he began teaching them. Professorial Lecturer Meredith Burnett came to value case studies when she began teaching because of their ability to help students analyze issues that were relevant to their current or future careers, and for enabling her to dive into the challenges these issues posed for organizations. Professor Joshua Margolis noted how seeing an expert case teacher in action helped bring cases to life during an MBA class he took as a doctoral student.

At institutions where the case method is emphasized, our interviewees’ experiences with cases overlapped substantially with their time teaching in these programs. Sometimes, however, the decision to use cases was driven in part by pragmatism, as Associate Professor Leon Prieto suggested in his response about using cases so that his students would find his classes more meaningful.

What Cases Do Well

For our second question, regarding what our interviewees believe cases do especially well, responses revolved around two broadly related themes. The first emphasizes how cases bring concepts to life. The second highlights how case teaching enhances peer learning.

Karin Schnarr: Cases provide students with the opportunity to learn and apply concepts in a safe environment that’s going to model what they’re going to do outside of academia. It makes theoretical concepts concrete, really demonstrating how they’re going to work in the real world—where there’s imperfect information, and there’s ambiguity related to situations. But I think at their core, what makes cases so interesting to me is that they’re stories.

Good cases are great stories that draw the reader into the action, draw the reader into the situation, make them excited about the analysis that they’re going to be performing. And that makes cases so much more fun to read, so much more fun to teach with than just journal articles or textbook chapters.

William Kerr: I think for MBA students, as we look towards their 30-, 40-year career that will lie ahead, we can’t train them in a paint-by-numbers exercise for every situation that they’re going to encounter. So what cases do in the fact, they really have to dive in on a consistent basis into a bunch of management challenges. It teaches them how to approach situations.

Simone Phipps: Cases do a really good job of demonstrating relevance of material covered. Because these cases present real-world scenarios and real-world challenges. And so, for example, if I’m teaching an organizational behavior course where I’m talking about motivation, then I can use a case that can really show the importance of motivation and why motivation is relevant in the real world. So I can use a case that features a company where employees are highly motivated, or on the flip side where employees are not so motivated. And then students can recognize causes and consequences of motivation or lack of motivation.

Bora Ozkan: The most important things that cases do well for students is to learn from peers. The learning happens throughout the time they spend on cases—if it’s online, asynchronously. They get to spend some time by them getting together in the classroom, or outside of classroom and talk to their peers. And especially when they come to the class. When they meet with their classmates.

That’s when they learn. They reflect their learning to others and learn from others—different ways of thinking, different ways of implementing. And they get knowledge from others. So I think this is one of the more important things that a case does well.

Ting Zhang: I think the strength of the case method allows students to really engage in deep perspective taking. By not only putting their minds with their hearts and souls into the positions of these protagonists, they can better understand problems at a deeper level. But it’s beyond just perspective taking of the protagonist itself. It’s also perspective taking of one another.

When we have students debate each other in the classroom, when we have students discuss interesting questions, we allow them to not only speak, but to exercise their skills in listening. Because part of having a deep discussion in the classroom is not only just having prepared what to say—but to enable ourselves to open our minds, open our eyes, open our ears to one another so that we can engage in a collaborative co-creation of knowledge.

One theme, reflected by Associate Professors Simone Phipps and Karin Schnarr, emphasized the ability of cases to bring abstract concepts to life, give examples that make these concepts relevant to students, and help students apply them. Schnarr’s observations about the value of psychological safety and the challenges of decision-making with imperfect information also echoed themes discussed earlier in this series. Further, as Professor William Kerr noted, cases then teach students how to approach decision-making situations.

Associate Professor Bora Ozkan and Assistant Professor Ting Zhang focused on the social aspect of case discussions. Ozkan noted how case teaching facilitates peer learning. Zhang’s insights suggested how stepping into a protagonist’s shoes not only makes the abstract more concrete but also enables learners to be more receptive to learning from their peers.

The Challenge of Cases

Our third question, “What have you seen as the biggest challenge in teaching and learning with the case method?” evoked a wide variety of replies.

Amy Edmondson: The biggest challenge is that it takes a lot of preparation on the part of the faculty and on the part of the students. And the case method learning just doesn’t go well when people aren’t prepared.

Willy Shih: For me, the biggest challenge in case teaching is getting students to take positions and challenge their peers. Now, I think this is because of the broader desire for students to be agreeable and to be liked by their classmates. So this requires some effort on my part as an instructor by setting the tone to create an environment where debate is viewed as a way of probing more deeply and collectively arriving at a better answer.

For me, this has meant working with a new class at the beginning of a semester to set this tone. And it’s really about the style of running a class. I can say students really appreciate it when you get there. And the more success you have early on establishing these kinds of discussion patterns, the easier it gets.

William Kerr: So one is building energy around a case study. Some cases are just naturally sexy. People just are excited to talk about them. They want to rock and roll. Others, it’s both an instructor responsibility and also the class’s responsibility to really dig into it and internally build an energy around understanding what’s going on.

The second challenge of a case is often around hitting that right mark, that right calibration in terms of the details in the lessons that are generated. Not to go too far down into the weeds that were very case specific and really weren’t that essential for applying this into future situations that students will find themselves in, but also not staying too high level, too general and having enough friction in the conversation, enough challenges around the decisions that are being made that you’re specific enough to honor the situation that the protagonist was in. But you also can then transfer the lessons into other settings.

Srikant Datar: If we imagine cases as developing the knowing of leadership, they are perhaps less perfectly suited to developing doing and being skills. What happens when you need to implement your action plan? How do you identify and develop your personal leadership strengths?

Tsedal Neeley: The biggest challenge in teaching the case method is that it’s so organic that you can easily end up in some land mines that you weren’t prepared for. Suppose someone in the room says something that is a political hot potato and others get offended and they start to really fight. What do you do? Those are the types of things that you’re never really prepared for.

But I have learned over the years that those moments are actual gifts. They’re gifts that you can turn right back to the class and try to understand and unravel the nature of that land mine. And in the end, everyone learns. So I used to worry about it at one point. But nowadays, if it does happen, I integrate it into the learning that we’re all working towards.

Ryan Buell: I think the biggest challenge in teaching and learning with the case method is that it requires everyone—the case teacher and every single student—to be vulnerable and to admit that we don’t have all the answers. The world’s a much more comfortable place when we can convince ourselves that we figured everything out. But the reality is that we almost never have. And teaching and learning by the case method means having the courage to share your ideas but also having the courage to hear others’ ideas and to acknowledge that your thinking has changed as a result.

In that way, lectures are much more comfortable. There is an implicit hierarchy in the classroom. The person in the front is the one with all the answers. Everybody else just takes notes. But how crazy is that? By teaching by the case method, you come to realize how much you can learn from your students. And how in a class of 30 or 60 or 90 people, you’re rarely the most knowledgeable person on any topic. That feeling of vulnerability can be an obstacle.

But once you’ve overcome it, there’s really no turning back. Every time I get to teach a case, I get to learn. And that makes every lesson, even for cases that I may have taught a hundred times, fresh, fun, and insightful, not just for the participants, but for me too. Make no mistake, teaching by the case method is harder than talking to a deck of slides, but it’s also so much more rewarding.

Professor Amy Edmondson highlighted the necessity of preparation by everyone involved—teachers and students—for case discussions to succeed.

Another thread of insight, suggested by Professor Willy Shih, highlights the initial challenge of getting students comfortable with case-method discussion and offers some methods for overcoming it. That is not surprising, given how accustomed many students are to classes that rely more on lectures.

As Professor Kerr noted, case discussions also present the more general challenge of building and sustaining energy during class. Even when students are comfortable with case discussions, they may find some cases less engaging. It is essential to help students learn how to “dig in” with a case and unearth its riches.

Kerr’s second observation, regarding the right level of abstraction for a case discussion, is related to his point about digging in. It is important to learn the nuances of a specific case; decision-makers must know the details to make informed choices. Yet case discussions must also induce common principles that are more broadly applicable. This balance can be difficult to achieve.

Dean Srikant Datar highlighted the gaps among knowing and doing and being as another challenge of case teaching. Gaining the conceptual and contextual insights that Kerr referenced is important, but learning how to implement these insights into an action plan and develop your personal strengths are just as essential to being a successful leader. Finding ways to enhance such skills may be a goal that future cases strive to achieve.

Further, the unstructured nature of case discussions poses both opportunities and challenges. Professor Tsedal Neeley observed that one challenge of case teaching is the possibility of being unable to control the conversation in the same way a lecturer can and the risks of having a discussion go off the rails. Yet, as Neeley also noted, such moments can offer powerful learning.

Finally, Associate Professor Buell’s discussion of vulnerability in the classroom highlighted the psychological challenges that case teaching can bring for both students and teachers. As he noted, lectures are a much more comfortable format for everyone. They certainly do not pose the challenges our interviewees highlighted. Yet the learning that can come from accepting and trying to overcome that vulnerability in working through a case together offers experiences like no other and complements the types of situations that Neeley discussed.

Advice for New Case Users

Our fourth question, “What advice would you give to someone teaching or learning with the case method for the first time?” also evoked different but related themes. Our interviewees focused on both students and faculty.

Srikant Datar: For students, my advice is to lean into the discussion. It is of course important to listen—but do not hesitate to join the conversation instead of waiting to make the perfect comment. The more you actively engage and make a habit of doing so the more you will get out of each class.

Leon Prieto: The advice I always provide my students who are learning with the case method for the first time is to spend some time to get to know each other—to set up some type of interactive activity, to get to know some fun things about each other. And I also encourage them to meet at least once a week with their teammates to actually work the case, try to problem solve, try to figure out a solution together. In the past I’ve had students who did not meet often and that created problems, especially with rapport. And they didn’t really have a meaningful connection with each other and also with the case. So it’s very important for them to spend time working the case together as a team.

Jan Rivkin: I really believe in investing in your students. Knowing them up front is one way to do that, but also just getting to know them over time—following their careers. People keep in touch. It’s a tremendous privilege of the job to know these individuals early on, as they’re learning—and then follow how their lives and careers unfold.

I’ve got a very simple rule of thumb. I am never too busy to speak with a former student. And that has served me well. They have just been incredible in helping me learn about business and becoming a better instructor and, I think, a better scholar.

Simone Phipps: I find it more insightful when you ask those broader questions that make the students think critically, problem solve, and make them have to come to a decision. The debate itself can be a lot of fun, but it can also be a bit awkward or uncomfortable depending on the topic. So it’s important as well to address expectations in terms of respectful dialogue and discussion—to make sure that everyone feels comfortable to voice their opinions. And that is like a safe space for students.

Ting Chang: The advice that I’ll provide has been passed down to me from many generations of instructors. And simply to trust our students—it sounds so simple, and yet it’s something that we often forget to remind ourselves, especially in moments that are unexpected. If we give them that space to offer reflections of what they’ve learned, to offer reflections of what’s still unresolved for them, it’s amazing what new insights can occur in those moments. And it’s amazing how those moments can be turned into opportunities for additional learning and growth.

Joshua Margolis: The advice I’d give someone who is learning to teach the case method is to be patient and to trust the process. Those are pieces of advice that I got from my mentors—professors Linda Hill, Nitin Nohria, and David Thomas. First, you have to be patient with a case discussion. You have to allow it to take shape. Second, you have to be patient with your own development. It takes time to master the craft of case-method teaching.

It is so different from many of our reflexes as faculty to download our knowledge and to share our excitement about certain findings. We want to share our excitement about a topic by driving the questioning and the probing and enabling students to discover on their own. And you have to trust the process. Things don’t come out in a case discussion in linear fashion.

You have to trust that your students who are coming in prepared, who are thoughtful, who are listening to each other, will get to the key insights and the key lessons that you hope to elicit. For someone learning from the case method for the first time, it’s almost the exact same counsel. Be patient and trust the process.

Trust the process that you will indeed learn without someone telling you the answer. It will emerge from the discussions, from your own analysis, and your own reflection on those discussions. And you have to be patient as you listen to discussion and as you build your capacity to listen—and listen carefully—and as you build your capacity to jump into the fray of discussion—sometimes saying exactly what you wanted, sometimes fumbling. But you will learn not just the content, but you will learn from the process of case learning itself.

Joseph Fuller: The unique thing about case method is that, unlike most topics in which you learn through studying, in case method you do your preparation, you do your reading, in order to learn. So it’s an inverse learning model from that which we’re used to. And even the best students will find at first a little bit of a strange experience—a little bit of an indirect way of learning.

And for an instructor, it’s very, very important to understand that you do not have the obligation—or for that matter the platform—to just march down the points you want to make sure you teach. You have to let it come to you.

On the student side, Dean Datar noted the importance of leaning into active learning by participating in the conversation. He suggested that, for students, waiting to offer the perfect insight is the enemy of offering a “good enough” comment that gets them engaged and makes them part of the conversation. Associate Professor Prieto’s suggestion about the importance of peer learning extends upon Dean Datar’s insight because students who meet to discuss cases before class can create safe space in which they can discover how to lean into active learning.

Professor Jan Rivkin’s response bridged between the student and faculty sides. As part three of this series suggests , investing in one’s students enhances their engagement. Yet this investment, as Rivkin noted, also benefits faculty inside and outside the classroom.

The second common theme in these responses revolved around learning to manage diversity of thought during discussions. As Associate Professor Phipps noted, it is important for case teachers to prepare for such variation. To this point, Professor Margolis and Assistant Professor Zhang emphasized the value of learning patience and trusting students. Margolis observed, “You have to trust that your students, who are coming in prepared, who are thoughtful, who are listening to each other, will get to the key insights and the key lessons that you hope to elicit.” To this point, Zhang suggests that even unexpected moments offer “opportunities for additional learning and growth.”

Case teachers should also remember that success in the classroom takes time to achieve. Margolis’s advice noted the distinctiveness of case teaching from lecture-based pedagogies: “It takes time to master the craft of case-method teaching. It is so different from many of our reflexes as faculty: to download our knowledge and to share our excitement about certain findings.”

Similarly, Professor Joseph Fuller argued that the nature of these differences centers on the “inverse learning model” that case discussions entail. That is, instead of learning through studying—the conventional mode of learning—with the case method, “you do your preparation in order to learn.” This model necessarily shifts the nature of discussions away from an orderly process in which students passively absorb wisdom from teachers. As the instructor, you must let the discussion come to you and think about how to continue provoking the right questions as the conversation unfolds.

The Future of Cases

Our fifth question, “How should future cases evolve?”[1] generally received more convergent responses regarding increased diversity of case protagonists and enhanced interactivity. We also received a couple of unique insights. One of the latter came from Professor Shih, who alluded to the conflict between the desire of most companies to be depicted positively in cases that are written about them and the learning that can be gained from studying failure and ambiguity.

Willy Shih: I think one of the challenges, these days, is maintaining freshness in the settings of cases, in a world where so much is changing so quickly. It’s really challenging, these days, to find organizations that are willing to share difficult problems, where things didn’t necessarily work out well, or the answer is ambiguous. Those are the situations where we really learn a lot. And these really make the best cases. Just as we have made so much progress in public health and safety issues, like in air travel, by analyzing failure, or what has gone wrong, I think more cases looking at this kind of analysis would be really very positive for learning.

Jan Rivkin: The number one thing on my wish list for future cases is greater diversity among the protagonists. Right now, the protagonists in the cases available don’t reflect the full palette of human talent. And that leads us to fail all of our students. We fail students who come from underrepresented groups by not giving them role models.

As one of my students said, “If I can see it, I could be it.” And we fail all of our other students by not helping them understand that talent can come from all backgrounds. If we’re sending our students out into a world marked by rich human differences—differences of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, politics, class, religion, nationality, you name it—and in that world, we need them to be able to navigate the pitfalls that can come between differences. Even more than that, take those differences and turn them to sources of imagination, and creativity, and innovation.

We need to make the most out of those differences. And that is enhanced when case protagonists themselves reflect the rich differences of our world.

Joshua Margolis: I think cases will become far more media-rich, involving sound or video. And we’ll continue to experiment with things that we’re beginning with right now, like video-only cases in the classroom, where there is no preparation. You come in, and you see a segment of video.

You discuss it, and then you see another segment of video. And the case unfolds before your eyes in class, perhaps with the live protagonist as the last chapter.

Meredith Burnett: I would also like to see some element of gamification involved with cases. I think that would be a lot of fun for students to engage in that way. It might be a little different than reading a case and writing about the case. And then also, I was thinking it would be fun for students to get involved in some decision-making games around cases, using algorithms, something that they could do in class quickly.

Maybe have the instructors or faculty members learn about some of the algorithms that are available, and have students involved in a fun way in class, in terms of quick decision-making. I think that’s the way to go with cases, and that would make those cases a lot more engaging.

Bora Ozkan: Future cases should evolve around asynchronous content. As students learn differently, we can provide more asynchronous support and activities to students to learn from the case. And the technology is going to help. And I think we can use technology; one of the technologies that I think would evolve around is virtual reality. We can immerse students fully into virtual reality, in the shoes of the manager, by putting them in a virtual world. And I think that’s the future of the cases.

Joseph Fuller: Time is going to become a variable in cases in that we may be able, in the not too distant future, certainly in certain topic areas, be able to teach almost real-time cases. Imagine, for example, getting a flow of information about a company that’s issuing a quarterly report in real time, from a CNBC, or from a Reuters, or from a Bloomberg, and having the students do their analysis of the stock just as a stock trader does, as opposed to having a more static case.

And we should be thinking more expansively, and more ambitiously, about how to make some of our courses, at least, work at the pace and cadence of actual decisions, as opposed to simplifying all that, distilling out a lot of static, and memorializing it in written form.

Professor Rivkin’s comments echoed those of numerous other interviewees when he suggested how important it is for future cases to feature more diverse protagonists. Representing this full array of diversity is important not just for underrepresented populations, Rivkin argued, but also for all students to realize that talent can come from anywhere. Further, such cases can enable future leaders to both navigate the potential conflict that can arise among a diverse workforce and to make the most of their differences.

The other common response to this question centered on the ways future cases can be more interactive. Professor Margolis, for instance, noted the potential to make cases media rich, including the possibility of video-only cases “where the case unfolds before your eyes in class.”

Part of this enhanced interactivity in future cases will likely involve more immersive experiences. Professorial Lecturer Meredith Burnett highlighted the possibility of making cases more gamified to enhance students’ decision-making experiences. Associate Professor Ozkan, who is leading the development of cases that use virtual reality (VR) at Temple University, noted the power of VR to immerse students in the world of a general manager.

Building on the theme of heightened interactivity, Professor Fuller noted the potential of future cases to change how time is treated in cases. What if, he suggested, students are given the same flow of financial information about a company’s earnings and “do their analysis of the stock just as a stock trader does”? Having some cases proceed “at the pace and cadence of actual decisions” with all the attendant complexity that decision-makers must sort through will go a long way toward immersing students in the reality of business life.

Final Thoughts: A Commitment to Cases

When we asked our interviewees if they had any final thoughts, many built on their responses to our prior questions.

Associate Professor Schnarr’s comments about how powerful and engaging cases are for both faculty and students echoed several other answers we received.

Karin Schnarr: Case teaching is rewarding. And quite frankly, it’s just really fun to do. I find that my class time flies by, and students end the case discussion and leave the classroom still talking about the case, arguing, discussing, debating about what the right solution for the company is. It’s a different class experience every time because you’ve got different students, which, for me, makes it energizing and exciting. I never get bored of teaching the same case over and over again. That’s exactly what I want to have happen as an instructor, and it’s why I love teaching with cases so much.

Tsedal Neeley: I consider the case method as an art, a craft. It’s both art and science actually. It takes a long time to develop into the best case teachers that we can be, all of us, so that we’re authentically teaching with our energy, with our passion, with our whole selves. We become the instruments that bring learning alive.

Ryan Buell: I think it’s fitting that the centennial of the case method at HBS coincides with a global pandemic. That’s causing us to reconsider the fundamentals of how we teach and the fundamentals of business more broadly. It’s fitting because what’s core to case teaching and learning, the idea that we can figure out better solutions to challenging problems together, has never been more necessary than it is right now.

Writing the next chapter for the next normal will require more people who are trained in the collaborative problem-solving process that’s at the heart of the case method. And I think that means that this method of teaching and learning will become even more vital in the years ahead.

We also heard insights that spoke both to case teaching in general and to what case teaching has taught us during this last extraordinary year. To that end, we felt inspired by Professor Neeley’s reminder that case teaching is both an art and a science that at its best helps case teachers “become the instrument that brings learning alive.”

Echoing Associate Professor Buell, we hope all our readers can become such instruments in enhancing well-being for all: “Writing the next chapter for the next normal will require more people who are trained in the collaborative problem-solving process that’s at the heart of the case method. I think this means that this method of teaching and learning will become even more vital in the years ahead.”

We would also love to hear from you . What have your experiences with case teaching been? What has challenged and inspired you? What advice would you give to prospective or experienced case teachers?

Note: We gratefully acknowledge all the faculty members who generously contributed their time and expertise in recording the videos that made this article possible: Meredith Burnett, Professorial Lecturer at the Kogod School of Business at American University; Ryan W. Buell, Finnegan Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Srikant M. Datar, George F. Baker Professor of Administration and Dean of the Faculty at Harvard Business School; Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School; Joseph Fuller, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School; William R. Kerr, Dmitri V. D’Arbeloff, Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Joshua D. Margolis, James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Bora Ozkan, Associate Professor of Finance at Fox School of Business at Temple University; Simone T. A. Phipps, Associate Professor of Management at the School of Business at Middle Georgia State University and Associate Research Fellow at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge; Leon C. Prieto, Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business at Clayton State University; Jan W. Rivkin, C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Karin Schnarr, Associate Professor of Policy and Law at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University; Willy C. Shih, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School; Ting Zhang, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

[1] In Part 5 of this series , we discuss the future of the case in greater detail.

Explore all 5 parts of our series celebrating 100 years of the business case.

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Center for Teaching

Case studies.

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Case studies are stories that are used as a teaching tool to show the application of a theory or concept to real situations. Dependent on the goal they are meant to fulfill, cases can be fact-driven and deductive where there is a correct answer, or they can be context driven where multiple solutions are possible. Various disciplines have employed case studies, including humanities, social sciences, sciences, engineering, law, business, and medicine. Good cases generally have the following features: they tell a good story, are recent, include dialogue, create empathy with the main characters, are relevant to the reader, serve a teaching function, require a dilemma to be solved, and have generality.

Instructors can create their own cases or can find cases that already exist. The following are some things to keep in mind when creating a case:

• What do you want students to learn from the discussion of the case?
• What do they already know that applies to the case?
• What are the issues that may be raised in discussion?
• How will the case and discussion be introduced?
• What preparation is expected of students? (Do they need to read the case ahead of time? Do research? Write anything?)
• What directions do you need to provide students regarding what they are supposed to do and accomplish?
• Do you need to divide students into groups or will they discuss as the whole class?
• Are you going to use role-playing or facilitators or record keepers? If so, how?
• What are the opening questions?
• How much time is needed for students to discuss the case?
• What concepts are to be applied/extracted during the discussion?
• How will you evaluate students?

To find other cases that already exist, try the following websites:

• The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science , University of Buffalo. SUNY-Buffalo maintains this set of links to other case studies on the web in disciplines ranging from engineering and ethics to sociology and business
• A Journal of Teaching Cases in Public Administration and Public Policy , University of Washington

For more information:

• World Association for Case Method Research and Application

Book Review :  Teaching and the Case Method , 3rd ed., vols. 1 and 2, by Louis Barnes, C. Roland (Chris) Christensen, and Abby Hansen. Harvard Business School Press, 1994; 333 pp. (vol 1), 412 pp. (vol 2).

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What the Case Study Method Really Teaches

• Nitin Nohria

Seven meta-skills that stick even if the cases fade from memory.

It’s been 100 years since Harvard Business School began using the case study method. Beyond teaching specific subject matter, the case study method excels in instilling meta-skills in students. This article explains the importance of seven such skills: preparation, discernment, bias recognition, judgement, collaboration, curiosity, and self-confidence.

During my decade as dean of Harvard Business School, I spent hundreds of hours talking with our alumni. To enliven these conversations, I relied on a favorite question: “What was the most important thing you learned from your time in our MBA program?”

• Nitin Nohria is the George F. Baker Professor of Business Administration, Distinguished University Service Professor, and former dean of Harvard Business School.

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• Our Mission

Making Learning Relevant With Case Studies

The open-ended problems presented in case studies give students work that feels connected to their lives.

To prepare students for jobs that haven’t been created yet, we need to teach them how to be great problem solvers so that they’ll be ready for anything. One way to do this is by teaching content and skills using real-world case studies, a learning model that’s focused on reflection during the problem-solving process. It’s similar to project-based learning, but PBL is more focused on students creating a product.

Case studies have been used for years by businesses, law and medical schools, physicians on rounds, and artists critiquing work. Like other forms of problem-based learning, case studies can be accessible for every age group, both in one subject and in interdisciplinary work.

You can get started with case studies by tackling relatable questions like these with your students:

• How can we limit food waste in the cafeteria?
• How can we get our school to recycle and compost waste? (Or, if you want to be more complex, how can our school reduce its carbon footprint?)
• How can we improve school attendance?
• How can we reduce the number of people who get sick at school during cold and flu season?

Addressing questions like these leads students to identify topics they need to learn more about. In researching the first question, for example, students may see that they need to research food chains and nutrition. Students often ask, reasonably, why they need to learn something, or when they’ll use their knowledge in the future. Learning is most successful for students when the content and skills they’re studying are relevant, and case studies offer one way to create that sense of relevance.

Teaching With Case Studies

Ultimately, a case study is simply an interesting problem with many correct answers. What does case study work look like in classrooms? Teachers generally start by having students read the case or watch a video that summarizes the case. Students then work in small groups or individually to solve the case study. Teachers set milestones defining what students should accomplish to help them manage their time.

During the case study learning process, student assessment of learning should be focused on reflection. Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick’s Learning and Leading With Habits of Mind gives several examples of what this reflection can look like in a classroom: 

Journaling: At the end of each work period, have students write an entry summarizing what they worked on, what worked well, what didn’t, and why. Sentence starters and clear rubrics or guidelines will help students be successful. At the end of a case study project, as Costa and Kallick write, it’s helpful to have students “select significant learnings, envision how they could apply these learnings to future situations, and commit to an action plan to consciously modify their behaviors.”

Interviews: While working on a case study, students can interview each other about their progress and learning. Teachers can interview students individually or in small groups to assess their learning process and their progress.

Student discussion: Discussions can be unstructured—students can talk about what they worked on that day in a think-pair-share or as a full class—or structured, using Socratic seminars or fishbowl discussions. If your class is tackling a case study in small groups, create a second set of small groups with a representative from each of the case study groups so that the groups can share their learning.

4 Tips for Setting Up a Case Study

1. Identify a problem to investigate: This should be something accessible and relevant to students’ lives. The problem should also be challenging and complex enough to yield multiple solutions with many layers.

2. Give context: Think of this step as a movie preview or book summary. Hook the learners to help them understand just enough about the problem to want to learn more.

3. Have a clear rubric: Giving structure to your definition of quality group work and products will lead to stronger end products. You may be able to have your learners help build these definitions.

4. Provide structures for presenting solutions: The amount of scaffolding you build in depends on your students’ skill level and development. A case study product can be something like several pieces of evidence of students collaborating to solve the case study, and ultimately presenting their solution with a detailed slide deck or an essay—you can scaffold this by providing specified headings for the sections of the essay.

Problem-Based Teaching Resources

There are many high-quality, peer-reviewed resources that are open source and easily accessible online.

• The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science at the University at Buffalo built an online collection of more than 800 cases that cover topics ranging from biochemistry to economics. There are resources for middle and high school students.
• Models of Excellence , a project maintained by EL Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has examples of great problem- and project-based tasks—and corresponding exemplary student work—for grades pre-K to 12.
• The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning at Purdue University is an open-source journal that publishes examples of problem-based learning in K–12 and post-secondary classrooms.
• The Tech Edvocate has a list of websites and tools related to problem-based learning.

In their book Problems as Possibilities , Linda Torp and Sara Sage write that at the elementary school level, students particularly appreciate how they feel that they are taken seriously when solving case studies. At the middle school level, “researchers stress the importance of relating middle school curriculum to issues of student concern and interest.” And high schoolers, they write, find the case study method “beneficial in preparing them for their future.”

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Case Method Teaching and Learning

What is the case method? How can the case method be used to engage learners? What are some strategies for getting started? This guide helps instructors answer these questions by providing an overview of the case method while highlighting learner-centered and digitally-enhanced approaches to teaching with the case method. The guide also offers tips to instructors as they get started with the case method and additional references and resources.

On this page:

What is case method teaching.

• Case Method at Columbia

Why use the Case Method?

Case method teaching approaches, how do i get started.

• Additional Resources

The CTL is here to help!

For support with implementing a case method approach in your course, email [email protected] to schedule your 1-1 consultation .

Cite this resource: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2019). Case Method Teaching and Learning. Columbia University. Retrieved from [today’s date] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/case-method/  

Case method 1 teaching is an active form of instruction that focuses on a case and involves students learning by doing 2 3 . Cases are real or invented stories 4  that include “an educational message” or recount events, problems, dilemmas, theoretical or conceptual issue that requires analysis and/or decision-making.

Case-based teaching simulates real world situations and asks students to actively grapple with complex problems 5 6 This method of instruction is used across disciplines to promote learning, and is common in law, business, medicine, among other fields. See Table 1 below for a few types of cases and the learning they promote.

Table 1: Types of cases and the learning they promote.

For a more complete list, see Case Types & Teaching Methods: A Classification Scheme from the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science.

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Case Method Teaching and Learning at Columbia

The case method is actively used in classrooms across Columbia, at the Morningside campus in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), the School of Business, Arts and Sciences, among others, and at Columbia University Irving Medical campus.

Faculty Spotlight:

Professor Mary Ann Price on Using Case Study Method to Place Pre-Med Students in Real-Life Scenarios

Read more  

Professor De Pinho on Using the Case Method in the Mailman Core

Case method teaching has been found to improve student learning, to increase students’ perception of learning gains, and to meet learning objectives 8 9 . Faculty have noted the instructional benefits of cases including greater student engagement in their learning 10 , deeper student understanding of concepts, stronger critical thinking skills, and an ability to make connections across content areas and view an issue from multiple perspectives 11 . 

Through case-based learning, students are the ones asking questions about the case, doing the problem-solving, interacting with and learning from their peers, “unpacking” the case, analyzing the case, and summarizing the case. They learn how to work with limited information and ambiguity, think in professional or disciplinary ways, and ask themselves “what would I do if I were in this specific situation?”

The case method bridges theory to practice, and promotes the development of skills including: communication, active listening, critical thinking, decision-making, and metacognitive skills 12 , as students apply course content knowledge, reflect on what they know and their approach to analyzing, and make sense of a case. 

Though the case method has historical roots as an instructor-centered approach that uses the Socratic dialogue and cold-calling, it is possible to take a more learner-centered approach in which students take on roles and tasks traditionally left to the instructor. 

Cases are often used as “vehicles for classroom discussion” 13 . Students should be encouraged to take ownership of their learning from a case. Discussion-based approaches engage students in thinking and communicating about a case. Instructors can set up a case activity in which students are the ones doing the work of “asking questions, summarizing content, generating hypotheses, proposing theories, or offering critical analyses” 14 . 

The role of the instructor is to share a case or ask students to share or create a case to use in class, set expectations, provide instructions, and assign students roles in the discussion. Student roles in a case discussion can include: 

• discussion “starters” get the conversation started with a question or posing the questions that their peers came up with; 
• facilitators listen actively, validate the contributions of peers, ask follow-up questions, draw connections, refocus the conversation as needed; 
• recorders take-notes of the main points of the discussion, record on the board, upload to CourseWorks, or type and project on the screen; and 
• discussion “wrappers” lead a summary of the main points of the discussion. 

Prior to the case discussion, instructors can model case analysis and the types of questions students should ask, co-create discussion guidelines with students, and ask for students to submit discussion questions. During the discussion, the instructor can keep time, intervene as necessary (however the students should be doing the talking), and pause the discussion for a debrief and to ask students to reflect on what and how they learned from the case activity. 

Note: case discussions can be enhanced using technology. Live discussions can occur via video-conferencing (e.g., using Zoom ) or asynchronous discussions can occur using the Discussions tool in CourseWorks (Canvas) .

Table 2 includes a few interactive case method approaches. Regardless of the approach selected, it is important to create a learning environment in which students feel comfortable participating in a case activity and learning from one another. See below for tips on supporting student in how to learn from a case in the “getting started” section and how to create a supportive learning environment in the Guide for Inclusive Teaching at Columbia . 

Table 2. Strategies for Engaging Students in Case-Based Learning

Approaches to case teaching should be informed by course learning objectives, and can be adapted for small, large, hybrid, and online classes. Instructional technology can be used in various ways to deliver, facilitate, and assess the case method. For instance, an online module can be created in CourseWorks (Canvas) to structure the delivery of the case, allow students to work at their own pace, engage all learners, even those reluctant to speak up in class, and assess understanding of a case and student learning. Modules can include text, embedded media (e.g., using Panopto or Mediathread ) curated by the instructor, online discussion, and assessments. Students can be asked to read a case and/or watch a short video, respond to quiz questions and receive immediate feedback, post questions to a discussion, and share resources. 

For more information about options for incorporating educational technology to your course, please contact your Learning Designer .

To ensure that students are learning from the case approach, ask them to pause and reflect on what and how they learned from the case. Time to reflect  builds your students’ metacognition, and when these reflections are collected they provides you with insights about the effectiveness of your approach in promoting student learning.

Well designed case-based learning experiences: 1) motivate student involvement, 2) have students doing the work, 3) help students develop knowledge and skills, and 4) have students learning from each other.  

Designing a case-based learning experience should center around the learning objectives for a course. The following points focus on intentional design. 

Identify learning objectives, determine scope, and anticipate challenges. 

• Why use the case method in your course? How will it promote student learning differently than other approaches? 
• What are the learning objectives that need to be met by the case method? What knowledge should students apply and skills should they practice? 
• What is the scope of the case? (a brief activity in a single class session to a semester-long case-based course; if new to case method, start small with a single case). 
• What challenges do you anticipate (e.g., student preparation and prior experiences with case learning, discomfort with discussion, peer-to-peer learning, managing discussion) and how will you plan for these in your design? 
• If you are asking students to use transferable skills for the case method (e.g., teamwork, digital literacy) make them explicit. 

Determine how you will know if the learning objectives were met and develop a plan for evaluating the effectiveness of the case method to inform future case teaching. 

• What assessments and criteria will you use to evaluate student work or participation in case discussion? 
• How will you evaluate the effectiveness of the case method? What feedback will you collect from students? 
• How might you leverage technology for assessment purposes? For example, could you quiz students about the case online before class, accept assignment submissions online, use audience response systems (e.g., PollEverywhere) for formative assessment during class? 

Select an existing case, create your own, or encourage students to bring course-relevant cases, and prepare for its delivery

• Where will the case method fit into the course learning sequence? 
• Is the case at the appropriate level of complexity? Is it inclusive, culturally relevant, and relatable to students? 
• What materials and preparation will be needed to present the case to students? (e.g., readings, audiovisual materials, set up a module in CourseWorks). 

Plan for the case discussion and an active role for students

• What will your role be in facilitating case-based learning? How will you model case analysis for your students? (e.g., present a short case and demo your approach and the process of case learning) (Davis, 2009). 
• What discussion guidelines will you use that include your students’ input? 
• How will you encourage students to ask and answer questions, summarize their work, take notes, and debrief the case? 
• If students will be working in groups, how will groups form? What size will the groups be? What instructions will they be given? How will you ensure that everyone participates? What will they need to submit? Can technology be leveraged for any of these areas? 
• Have you considered students of varied cognitive and physical abilities and how they might participate in the activities/discussions, including those that involve technology? 

Student preparation and expectations

• How will you communicate about the case method approach to your students? When will you articulate the purpose of case-based learning and expectations of student engagement? What information about case-based learning and expectations will be included in the syllabus?
• What preparation and/or assignment(s) will students complete in order to learn from the case? (e.g., read the case prior to class, watch a case video prior to class, post to a CourseWorks discussion, submit a brief memo, complete a short writing assignment to check students’ understanding of a case, take on a specific role, prepare to present a critique during in-class discussion).

Andersen, E. and Schiano, B. (2014). Teaching with Cases: A Practical Guide . Harvard Business Press. 

Bonney, K. M. (2015). Case Study Teaching Method Improves Student Performance and Perceptions of Learning Gains†. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education , 16 (1), 21–28. https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v16i1.846

Davis, B.G. (2009). Chapter 24: Case Studies. In Tools for Teaching. Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. 

Garvin, D.A. (2003). Making the Case: Professional Education for the world of practice. Harvard Magazine. September-October 2003, Volume 106, Number 1, 56-107.

Golich, V.L. (2000). The ABCs of Case Teaching. International Studies Perspectives. 1, 11-29. 

Golich, V.L.; Boyer, M; Franko, P.; and Lamy, S. (2000). The ABCs of Case Teaching. Pew Case Studies in International Affairs. Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. 

Heath, J. (2015). Teaching & Writing Cases: A Practical Guide. The Case Center, UK. 

Herreid, C.F. (2011). Case Study Teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning. No. 128, Winder 2011, 31 – 40. 

Herreid, C.F. (2007). Start with a Story: The Case Study Method of Teaching College Science . National Science Teachers Association. Available as an ebook through Columbia Libraries. 

Herreid, C.F. (2006). “Clicker” Cases: Introducing Case Study Teaching Into Large Classrooms. Journal of College Science Teaching. Oct 2006, 36(2). https://search.proquest.com/docview/200323718?pq-origsite=gscholar  

Krain, M. (2016). Putting the Learning in Case Learning? The Effects of Case-Based Approaches on Student Knowledge, Attitudes, and Engagement. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. 27(2), 131-153. 

Lundberg, K.O. (Ed.). (2011). Our Digital Future: Boardrooms and Newsrooms. Knight Case Studies Initiative. 

Popil, I. (2011). Promotion of critical thinking by using case studies as teaching method. Nurse Education Today, 31(2), 204–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2010.06.002

Schiano, B. and Andersen, E. (2017). Teaching with Cases Online . Harvard Business Publishing. 

Thistlethwaite, JE; Davies, D.; Ekeocha, S.; Kidd, J.M.; MacDougall, C.; Matthews, P.; Purkis, J.; Clay D. (2012). The effectiveness of case-based learning in health professional education: A BEME systematic review . Medical Teacher. 2012; 34(6): e421-44. 

Yadav, A.; Lundeberg, M.; DeSchryver, M.; Dirkin, K.; Schiller, N.A.; Maier, K. and Herreid, C.F. (2007). Teaching Science with Case Studies: A National Survey of Faculty Perceptions of the Benefits and Challenges of Using Cases. Journal of College Science Teaching; Sept/Oct 2007; 37(1). 

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. Second Edition. Jossey-Bass.

Additional resources 

Teaching with Cases , Harvard Kennedy School of Government. 

Features “what is a teaching case?” video that defines a teaching case, and provides documents to help students prepare for case learning, Common case teaching challenges and solutions, tips for teaching with cases. 

Promoting excellence and innovation in case method teaching: Teaching by the Case Method , Christensen Center for Teaching & Learning. Harvard Business School. 

National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science . University of Buffalo. 

A collection of peer-reviewed STEM cases to teach scientific concepts and content, promote process skills and critical thinking. The Center welcomes case submissions. Case classification scheme of case types and teaching methods:

• Different types of cases: analysis case, dilemma/decision case, directed case, interrupted case, clicker case, a flipped case, a laboratory case. 
• Different types of teaching methods: problem-based learning, discussion, debate, intimate debate, public hearing, trial, jigsaw, role-play. 

Columbia Resources

Resources available to support your use of case method: The University hosts a number of case collections including: the Case Consortium (a collection of free cases in the fields of journalism, public policy, public health, and other disciplines that include teaching and learning resources; SIPA’s Picker Case Collection (audiovisual case studies on public sector innovation, filmed around the world and involving SIPA student teams in producing the cases); and Columbia Business School CaseWorks , which develops teaching cases and materials for use in Columbia Business School classrooms.

Center for Teaching and Learning

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) offers a variety of programs and services for instructors at Columbia. The CTL can provide customized support as you plan to use the case method approach through implementation. Schedule a one-on-one consultation. 

Office of the Provost

The Hybrid Learning Course Redesign grant program from the Office of the Provost provides support for faculty who are developing innovative and technology-enhanced pedagogy and learning strategies in the classroom. In addition to funding, faculty awardees receive support from CTL staff as they redesign, deliver, and evaluate their hybrid courses.

The Start Small! Mini-Grant provides support to faculty who are interested in experimenting with one new pedagogical strategy or tool. Faculty awardees receive funds and CTL support for a one-semester period.

Explore our teaching resources.

• Blended Learning
• Contemplative Pedagogy
• Inclusive Teaching Guide
• FAQ for Teaching Assistants
• Metacognition

CTL resources and technology for you.

• Overview of all CTL Resources and Technology
• The origins of this method can be traced to Harvard University where in 1870 the Law School began using cases to teach students how to think like lawyers using real court decisions. This was followed by the Business School in 1920 (Garvin, 2003). These professional schools recognized that lecture mode of instruction was insufficient to teach critical professional skills, and that active learning would better prepare learners for their professional lives. ↩
• Golich, V.L. (2000). The ABCs of Case Teaching. International Studies Perspectives. 1, 11-29. ↩
• Herreid, C.F. (2007). Start with a Story: The Case Study Method of Teaching College Science . National Science Teachers Association. Available as an ebook through Columbia Libraries. ↩
• Davis, B.G. (2009). Chapter 24: Case Studies. In Tools for Teaching. Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. ↩
• Andersen, E. and Schiano, B. (2014). Teaching with Cases: A Practical Guide . Harvard Business Press. ↩
• Lundberg, K.O. (Ed.). (2011). Our Digital Future: Boardrooms and Newsrooms. Knight Case Studies Initiative. ↩
• Heath, J. (2015). Teaching & Writing Cases: A Practical Guide. The Case Center, UK. ↩
• Bonney, K. M. (2015). Case Study Teaching Method Improves Student Performance and Perceptions of Learning Gains†. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education , 16 (1), 21–28. https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v16i1.846 ↩
• Krain, M. (2016). Putting the Learning in Case Learning? The Effects of Case-Based Approaches on Student Knowledge, Attitudes, and Engagement. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. 27(2), 131-153. ↩
• Thistlethwaite, JE; Davies, D.; Ekeocha, S.; Kidd, J.M.; MacDougall, C.; Matthews, P.; Purkis, J.; Clay D. (2012). The effectiveness of case-based learning in health professional education: A BEME systematic review . Medical Teacher. 2012; 34(6): e421-44. ↩
• Yadav, A.; Lundeberg, M.; DeSchryver, M.; Dirkin, K.; Schiller, N.A.; Maier, K. and Herreid, C.F. (2007). Teaching Science with Case Studies: A National Survey of Faculty Perceptions of the Benefits and Challenges of Using Cases. Journal of College Science Teaching; Sept/Oct 2007; 37(1). ↩
• Popil, I. (2011). Promotion of critical thinking by using case studies as teaching method. Nurse Education Today, 31(2), 204–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2010.06.002 ↩
• Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. ↩
• Herreid, C.F. (2006). “Clicker” Cases: Introducing Case Study Teaching Into Large Classrooms. Journal of College Science Teaching. Oct 2006, 36(2). https://search.proquest.com/docview/200323718?pq-origsite=gscholar ↩

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Using Case Studies to Teach

Why Use Cases?

Many students are more inductive than deductive reasoners, which means that they learn better from examples than from logical development starting with basic principles. The use of case studies can therefore be a very effective classroom technique.

Case studies are have long been used in business schools, law schools, medical schools and the social sciences, but they can be used in any discipline when instructors want students to explore how what they have learned applies to real world situations. Cases come in many formats, from a simple “What would you do in this situation?” question to a detailed description of a situation with accompanying data to analyze. Whether to use a simple scenario-type case or a complex detailed one depends on your course objectives.

Most case assignments require students to answer an open-ended question or develop a solution to an open-ended problem with multiple potential solutions. Requirements can range from a one-paragraph answer to a fully developed group action plan, proposal or decision.

Common Case Elements

Most “full-blown” cases have these common elements:

• A decision-maker who is grappling with some question or problem that needs to be solved.
• A description of the problem’s context (a law, an industry, a family).
• Supporting data, which can range from data tables to links to URLs, quoted statements or testimony, supporting documents, images, video, or audio.

Case assignments can be done individually or in teams so that the students can brainstorm solutions and share the work load.

The following discussion of this topic incorporates material presented by Robb Dixon of the School of Management and Rob Schadt of the School of Public Health at CEIT workshops. Professor Dixon also provided some written comments that the discussion incorporates.

Advantages to the use of case studies in class

A major advantage of teaching with case studies is that the students are actively engaged in figuring out the principles by abstracting from the examples. This develops their skills in:

• Problem solving
• Analytical tools, quantitative and/or qualitative, depending on the case
• Decision making in complex situations
• Coping with ambiguities

Guidelines for using case studies in class

In the most straightforward application, the presentation of the case study establishes a framework for analysis. It is helpful if the statement of the case provides enough information for the students to figure out solutions and then to identify how to apply those solutions in other similar situations. Instructors may choose to use several cases so that students can identify both the similarities and differences among the cases.

Depending on the course objectives, the instructor may encourage students to follow a systematic approach to their analysis.  For example:

• What is the issue?
• What is the goal of the analysis?
• What is the context of the problem?
• What key facts should be considered?
• What alternatives are available to the decision-maker?
• What would you recommend — and why?

An innovative approach to case analysis might be to have students  role-play the part of the people involved in the case. This not only actively engages students, but forces them to really understand the perspectives of the case characters. Videos or even field trips showing the venue in which the case is situated can help students to visualize the situation that they need to analyze.

Accompanying Readings

Case studies can be especially effective if they are paired with a reading assignment that introduces or explains a concept or analytical method that applies to the case. The amount of emphasis placed on the use of the reading during the case discussion depends on the complexity of the concept or method. If it is straightforward, the focus of the discussion can be placed on the use of the analytical results. If the method is more complex, the instructor may need to walk students through its application and the interpretation of the results.

Leading the Case Discussion and Evaluating Performance

Decision cases are more interesting than descriptive ones. In order to start the discussion in class, the instructor can start with an easy, noncontroversial question that all the students should be able to answer readily. However, some of the best case discussions start by forcing the students to take a stand. Some instructors will ask a student to do a formal “open” of the case, outlining his or her entire analysis.  Others may choose to guide discussion with questions that move students from problem identification to solutions.  A skilled instructor steers questions and discussion to keep the class on track and moving at a reasonable pace.

In order to motivate the students to complete the assignment before class as well as to stimulate attentiveness during the class, the instructor should grade the participation—quantity and especially quality—during the discussion of the case. This might be a simple check, check-plus, check-minus or zero. The instructor should involve as many students as possible. In order to engage all the students, the instructor can divide them into groups, give each group several minutes to discuss how to answer a question related to the case, and then ask a randomly selected person in each group to present the group’s answer and reasoning. Random selection can be accomplished through rolling of dice, shuffled index cards, each with one student’s name, a spinning wheel, etc.

Tips on the Penn State U. website: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/cases/

If you are interested in using this technique in a science course, there is a good website on use of case studies in the sciences at the University of Buffalo.

Dunne, D. and Brooks, K. (2004) Teaching with Cases (Halifax, NS: Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education), ISBN 0-7703-8924-4 (Can be ordered at http://www.bookstore.uwo.ca/ at a cost of $15.00)

Case Study: Challenges and Issues in Teaching Fully Online Mechanical Engineering Courses

• Conference paper
• First Online: 01 January 2014
• Cite this conference paper

• Sara McCaslin 3 &
• Fredericka Brown 3  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 312))

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Every year more engineering programs are looking at online courses as a way to expand their programs and facilitate the educational goals of working professionals. This case study summarizes specific challenges faced by two faculty members in preparing and presenting six mechanical engineering classes, all core classes at either the graduate or undergraduate level, in a fully online format. The challenges discussed involve course preparation and planning, interaction with and among students, lack of student preparation, and exams.

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McCaslin, S., Brown, F. (2015). Case Study: Challenges and Issues in Teaching Fully Online Mechanical Engineering Courses. In: Elleithy, K., Sobh, T. (eds) New Trends in Networking, Computing, E-learning, Systems Sciences, and Engineering. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 312. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06764-3_74

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Challenges to Student Interdisciplinary Learning Effectiveness: An Empirical Case Study

1 The Graduate Institute of Design Science, Tatung University, Taipei 104, Taiwan

2 The Department of Industrial Design, Tatung University, Taipei 104, Taiwan

Wen-Qian Lu

Kai-yi wang, associated data.

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to The relevant data involves the internal information of the institution and personal information, and there is a need for confidentiality.

In order to meet industrial demands, some colleges and universities have offered interdisciplinary programs that integrate design, engineering, and business. However, how many changes these programs have brought to students, and whether students participating in these programs have had better interdisciplinary ability than students involved in a single discipline study have always been questions that many researchers want to explore. In a university that offers an interdisciplinary program, we found that there is no significant difference in interdisciplinary integration ability between the students participating in the interdisciplinary program and the students involved in a single discipline study through quantitative comparisons of 91 student questionnaires and analyses of interviews with nine teachers of interdisciplinary courses and other related staff members. This may result from the students’ lack of motivation, lack of prior experience, the influence of individual traits, the increase of learning pressure and academic burden, and the interference of disciplinary factors during interdisciplinary learning. The research finding is intended to improve student interdisciplinary learning effectiveness by facilitating interdisciplinary teachers’ understanding of the influencing factors of student interdisciplinary learning, and by providing a reference for interdisciplinary teaching design.

1. Introduction

In the past 20 years, discipline-based university education has undergone a great transformation towards interdisciplinary education. Interdisciplinary education and learning have become the focus of education and teaching research today ( Klaassen 2018 ). There has been growing interest in interdisciplinary education and the publications of interdisciplinary education research have increased significantly ( Heikkinen and Räisänen 2018 ). However, how effective is interdisciplinary education? To what extent have students improved their interdisciplinary ability? Although some studies in the fields of medical and nursing education have responded to these issues in recent years ( Bullard et al. 2019 ; Liu 2021 ), there is obviously a lack of interest in research in the fields of engineering and computer science education ( Heikkinen and Räisänen 2018 ). Overall, due to the challenges of effectiveness evaluation on interdisciplinary education, existing research has paid little attention to the growth and evaluation of students’ interdisciplinary ability ( Lattuca et al. 2017a ; Gao et al. 2020 ). It is even more difficult to find relevant literature on interdisciplinary teaching or empirical research ( Lindvig and Ulriksen 2019 ; Van den Beemt et al. 2020 ). Therefore, we could hardly find studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of interdisciplinary education through teaching and learning practices in class ( Gao et al. 2020 ). Are students involved in interdisciplinary education significantly different from students involved in a single discipline study in interdisciplinary ability? What specific teaching and learning factors affect the improvement of students’ interdisciplinary ability during interdisciplinary learning? Little has been learned so far. Biggs proposed a system model for teaching activities, which consists of four parts: student attributes, learning environment, learning process, and learning outcomes. Each part of the model follows the principle of alignment ( Biggs 1993 ). Spelt et al. believed that this theoretical model could more comprehensively explain the interrelationships among various elements in interdisciplinary teaching and pointed out that “interdisciplinary integration ability” as an interdisciplinary learning outcome would be affected by “student attributes” and “interdisciplinary learning environment” ( Spelt et al. 2009 ). This theory was applied and confirmed in subsequent studies by Spelt and Liu et al. ( Spelt et al. 2015 ; Liu et al. 2022 ). In this paper, we will combine this theory and previous research to discuss the definition and connotation of interdisciplinary integration ability, as well as the factors affecting students’ learning outcomes in the area of interdisciplinary learning environment and student attributes.

1.1. Interdisciplinarity Integration Ability

Spelt et al. believed that interdisciplinary integration ability is also interdisciplinary thinking, including interdisciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary skills ( Spelt et al. 2009 ). The research findings of Menken et al. show that the key to interdisciplinarity being different from multidisciplinarity is the integration of related concepts, insights, theories and/or methods from different disciplines ( Menken et al. 2016 ) (see Figure 1 ). Lattuca et al. argued that interdisciplinary ability enables students to integrate knowledge and methods from different domains for a comprehensive understanding of a problem ( Lattuca et al. 2017a ). Spelt et al. pointed out that the decisive feature of interdisciplinarity is the ability to integrate disciplinary knowledge. If there is no cultivation and training of this ability during teaching, but simply increased knowledge of different disciplines, it can still only be called multidisciplinary education ( Spelt et al. 2015 ). Based on previous research and assertions, it is not difficult for us to come to the conclusion that interdisciplinary integration should be the core and key of interdisciplinarity. Therefore, the improvement of interdisciplinary integration ability should be the key to the evaluation of interdisciplinary teaching effectiveness and the concrete representation of students’ interdisciplinary learning outcomes. However, although “interdisciplinary integration ability” is of critical importance to interdisciplinary teaching, there is not yet a unified definition in the scientific and pedagogical literature ( Danilova 2018 ), and the expressions of its connotation vary. For example, the IPEC (Interprofessional Education Collaborative) in the US defines core interdisciplinary ability as values/ethics for interprofessional practice, roles/responsibilities, interprofessional communication, and teams and teamwork. In addition, core interdisciplinary ability defined by the University of Virginia (2016) includes: communication, professionalism, shared problem-solving, shared decision making, and conflict resolution ( Chen et al. 2017 ). Wilhelmsson et al. pointed out that interdisciplinary ability should include: teamwork and group processes, reflection and documentation, communication, shared knowledge or general common knowledge base, and ethics ( Wilhelmsson et al. 2012 ). Interdisciplinary ability advocated by Lattuca et al. ( 2013 ) includes: awareness of disciplinarity, appreciation of disciplinary perspectives, appreciation of non-disciplinary perspectives, recognition of disciplinary limitations, interdisciplinary evaluation, ability to find common ground, reflexivity, and integrative skill; and subsequently these eight abilities are extracted into three: interdisciplinary skill, reflective behavior, and recognizing disciplinary perspectives ( Lattuca et al. 2013 ). The definitions of the above-mentioned core interdisciplinary integration ability are slightly different, but they all highlight similar abilities (see Table 1 ), including: interdisciplinary communication, facilitating the formation of shared knowledge base and problem-solving teamwork, interdisciplinary reflection and evaluation, accepting other disciplinary values or perspectives, having disciplinary awareness and perspectives, being able to recognize disciplinary limitations, integrating knowledge from different disciplines to deal with complex problems, professionalism, and other skills.

Difference between Multidisciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity. Collated, modified and drawn from Menken Steph, Keestra Machiel, Rutting Lucas, Post Ger, De Roo Mieke, Blad Sylvia, De Greef Linda. 2016. An introduction to interdisciplinary research: Theory and practice. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 31–32.

The Above-Mentioned Core Interdisciplinary Integration Abilities.

1.2. Student Attributes

Student attributes include motivation, individual traits, prior experience, etc. ( Spelt et al. 2009 , 2015 ; Liu et al. 2022 ). Some researchers discussed the motivations and goals of interdisciplinary learners. For example, Barnard pointed out that most students generally hold conflicting views on interdisciplinary learning ( Barnard et al. 2013 ). In their research, Kabo et al. mentioned that some reports indicated that people with engineering educational background put up resistance to interdisciplinary learning goals ( Kabo and Baillie 2009 ). Berasategi et al. believed that student individual conditions, including learning motivation and maturity, are closely related to their development of interdisciplinary thinking ( Berasategi et al. 2020 ). Some scholars discussed that learners’ prior experience seems to have an impact on interdisciplinary learning outcomes. Heiman pointed out that freshman students are reluctant to use learning methods different from what they have adopted in high school ( Heiman 2014 ). Studies found that students’ prior learning experience of a single discipline makes them feel overwhelmed and at a loss when faced with the teaching design and expectations of interdisciplinary courses ( Strain and Potter 2012 ).

1.3. Interdisciplinary Learning Environment

Interdisciplinary learning environment includes elements like courses, teachers, pedagogy, assessment, etc. ( Spelt et al. 2009 , 2015 ; Liu et al. 2022 ). Van den Beemt et al. suggested that any teachers and students involved in interdisciplinary education projects should be aware of the relation among the specific perspectives and visions of interdisciplinary education, and the chosen teaching methods ( Van den Beemt et al. 2020 ). Do believed that interdisciplinary courses should have a goal that can be achieved within a semester, while corresponding tasks should be designed and learning objectives should be set related to the level of difficulty ( Do 2013 ). Chen et al. pointed out that a course study load is critical to the effectiveness of interdisciplinary learning ( Chen et al. 2009 ). Hansen et al. believed the motivations and goals of the teaching program as the basis for an interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy in the context of interdisciplinary curriculum development ( Hansen and Dohn 2017 ). For the setting of teaching content, Biggs emphasized that if students want to obtain the desired learning outcomes, the basic task of teachers is to engage students in learning activities that may lead them to achieve these outcomes; during the process, deciding what students learn is far more important than what teachers do ( Biggs 1993 ). In addition, many scholars discussed teaching activities, curriculum design, teachers, teaching methods, assessment and other topics in terms of interdisciplinary learning environment ( Carreras Marín et al. 2013 ; Gómez Puente et al. 2013 ; Gouvea et al. 2013 ; Jones 2010 ; Lindvig and Ulriksen 2019 ).

The literature review provides a research framework for us to explore the effectiveness of interdisciplinary curriculum teaching practice that aims at the cultivation of interdisciplinary integration ability, and the influencing factors. Meanwhile, in view of the relative lack of empirical reports on interdisciplinary teaching, this paper will try to find out whether the students participating in an interdisciplinary program have a significant advantage over the students involved in a single discipline study by comparing their interdisciplinary integration ability through an empirical case study. Moreover, this paper will further analyze which elements in the areas of “student attributes” and “interdisciplinary learning environment” affect the interdisciplinary integration ability of the students participating in the interdisciplinary program based on the collected sample data and materials.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. setting and teaching of interdisciplinary courses.

In the face of rapid technological change, global climate change, and an ever-changing market, product innovation and sustainable development of manufacturing are no longer complex problems that can be completely solved by a single discipline. Some scholars pointed out that the life cycle of a product is divided into three stages: design, engineering, and sales, but these three stages are not independent, and on the contrary, they should be integrated ( Buxton 2010 ). The researchers of design education indicated that as industrial projects are becoming increasingly complex and larger in scale, the boundaries between artifacts, structures, and processes are beginning to be more blurred. Since the requirements at each level are rising, the complexity of design problems will be significantly increased. Therefore, designers will be required to be familiar with working in interdisciplinary teams that integrate engineering and business ( McDermott et al. 2014 ). In addition, many successful large international companies, such as GE, Sony, Philip, etc., have adopted the design perspective as a problem-solving tool for the entire company and a key element in the formation of corporate strategies. Design is increasingly recognized as a key to the success of business practices, and design thinking has become increasingly popular in the field of business ( Matthews and Wrigley 2017 ). Gill et al. believed that interdisciplinarity integrating mechanics, electronics, information technology and design is the future of Industry 4.0, and the integration of these majors will create solutions for complex problems faced by intelligent manufacturing, and product innovation and development ( Gill et al. 2021 ). Driven by industrial development, in fact, some educational institutions have begun to try to carry out interdisciplinary teaching activities that integrate design, business, and engineering technology, such as Jiangnan University in mainland China, Arizona State University in the United States, etc. ( McDermott et al. 2014 ; Li et al. 2019 ).

2.1.1. Setting of Interdisciplinary Courses

The interdisciplinary courses mentioned in this paper are developed and designed by a comprehensive university in Taiwan according to the above-mentioned industrial talent development trend. The university’s mission is to cultivate applied and compound talent for industrial development. A great number of leaders of large international enterprises have graduated from the school successively. Every year, the school regularly invites people from the industry, including prominent alumni, to discuss with the school’s teachers and educational administrators industrial talent needs as well as current education trends and issues. The school’s interdisciplinary program was established in this context. The program is aimed at students majoring in Industrial Design, Media Design, Materials Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Business Management, Applied Foreign Languages, etc. It integrates courses and teaching resources in the fields of business, engineering and design, with the goal of cultivating interdisciplinary integration ability, to form an interdisciplinary curriculum system consisting of interdisciplinary basic courses (i.e., introductory courses for business, engineering, and design majors) + interdisciplinary integration courses like Capstone + internship and practical courses. The interdisciplinary program is intended to improve students’ skills in interdisciplinary communication, interdisciplinary teamwork, interdisciplinary reflection and evaluation, interdisciplinary values or viewpoints, disciplinary limitation cognition, and interdisciplinary knowledge integration.

This program offers 23 courses, including Business Analysis, Applied Electronic Creation, Materials Processing and Analysis, Design Fundamentals, Capstone, etc. These courses are arranged in various stages from the first year to the fourth year in this university, and there is a progressive relationship between the courses before and after (see Table 2 for details). This is a semi-closed academic program, exit only and no entry. Therefore, students must join this program in the first semester of their freshman year and those who try to join the program midway are rejected. In addition to completing the courses of their own majors, they need to complete the various courses of the interdisciplinary program. Meanwhile, students can be exempted from taking the interdisciplinary basic courses in this program within their own disciplines. In addition, after the start of the program, the courses that have been registered and selected during the semester cannot be withdrawn, but in accordance with the principle of voluntariness, the participants are allowed to stop the study of subsequent unselected courses and withdraw from the program.

The Interdisciplinary Program.

2.1.2. Teaching of Interdisciplinary Courses

More than 30 teachers from the College of Engineering, College of Management, and College of Design are involved in this interdisciplinary program. The interdisciplinary basic courses are taught by the teachers from these three colleges respectively. Since most of these courses belong to introductory or entry level courses, the teachers of each college mainly adopt the teaching method that combines more traditional theoretical lectures and practice training to cultivate students’ cognition of other disciplines’ values, viewpoints and methods. The students participating in these courses are not students of the disciplines to which the courses belong. The teaching of Capstone interdisciplinary integration courses is led and aided by an interdisciplinary teaching team composed of teachers from the three colleges in PBL teaching mode. All students participating in these interdisciplinary capstones are required to form interdisciplinary teams when taking these courses to complete corresponding subject training by solving real and complex problems.

2.2. Measurements and Interviews

Self-assessment comparisons of interdisciplinary integration ability indicators were made in the above-mentioned university between the students in higher grades participating in an interdisciplinary program and the students in higher grades involved in a single discipline study. Considering that there may be some subjective bias of student self-assessments, the research group planned to conduct sample interviews with the tested students to more objectively evaluate the difference in interdisciplinary integration ability of this group of students by collecting their coursework and referring to expert evaluations. However, due to some obstacles, such as the students’ unwillingness and earlier departure of graduates caused by temporary school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the research group failed to collect relevant students’ interview materials and interdisciplinary coursework. Therefore, members of the research group interviewed the teachers, tutors, and program administrators involved in interdisciplinary teaching in the university, to ask about their understanding of these students. It is intended to more objectively understand the performance of this group of students making self-assessments from the perspectives of the teachers. All the students participated in the self-assessments of interdisciplinary integration ability indicators voluntarily, and all the staff members invited to the interviews approved the acquisition and study of the interview recordings. The details are as follows:

2.2.1. Interdisciplinary Integration Ability Measurements

Chen, Wang et al. synthesized previous research findings, summarized the connotations of interdisciplinary integration ability discussed in the first part of this paper and defined it as “common interdisciplinary integration-based core competencies”, i.e., shared interdisciplinary integration ability that students of different disciplines should have. Based on this definition and combining the characteristics of the cultural background and native language habits of local students growing up and the general conditions of curriculum teaching, they developed an interdisciplinary integration ability scale (see Appendix A for details), which specifically includes three sub-ability measurements, i.e., “interdisciplinary communication, interdisciplinary reflection, and interdisciplinary practice”, and a total of 16 questions ( Chen et al. 2017 ). Among them, “interdisciplinary communication” is reflected in the three main indicators of “respecting professional opinions, understanding different professional terms, and communicating through communication tools”, and includes six questions; “interdisciplinary reflection” is reflected in the three main indicators of “understanding the role differences among people with different expertise, making a reflection and generating new ideas through the process of interaction with others, and reflecting on the problems encountered in the process”, and includes five questions; “interdisciplinary practice” is reflected in the three main indicators of “discovering teamwork problems and proposing practical solutions, evaluating the work efficiency of team members, and evaluating the effectiveness and making suggestions for improvement”, and includes five questions. The 16 questions are answered based on a 5-point Likert scale, where 1 is strongly disagree, 2 is somewhat disagree, 3 is neutral/no opinion, 4 is somewhat agree, and 5 is strongly agree. This scale has been used in universities in Taiwan and has shown good reliability. In this case, considering the school’s understanding of the cultivation of students’ interdisciplinary integration ability, after discussing with some research experts, the research group adopted this scale to make measurement comparisons of “interdisciplinary communication, interdisciplinary reflection, and interdisciplinary practice” between the students participating in the interdisciplinary program and the students involved in a single discipline study in the university. In addition, in the pretests before using the scale, a total of 60 questionnaires were distributed, and 60 valid questionnaires were collected. The reliability value of Cronbach’s α is .88, which indicates high reliability of the questionnaire design and thus it can be used for testing.

Samples of Students Participating in the Interdisciplinary Program

The students participating in the interdisciplinary program are undergraduate students in higher grades majoring in Industrial Design, Media Design, Materials Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and Business Management from the above-mentioned university. When they entered the university in the first year, they attended the introduction meeting for the interdisciplinary program, and signed up to participate in the program. The research group conducted a random sampling of the students in higher grades who have completed the integrated Capstone courses, and collected 19 valid interdisciplinary student samples (excluding the student samples for the pretests), including three samples of Industrial Design majors, four samples of Media Design majors, five samples of Materials Engineering majors, three samples of Mechanical Engineering majors, one sample of Electrical Engineering major, and three samples of Computer Science and Engineering majors.

Samples of Students not Participating in the Interdisciplinary Program

The research group randomly distributed questionnaires to the students in higher grades in the university who have not participated in the interdisciplinary program. A total of 72 valid questionnaires were collected (excluding the questionnaires for the pretests), and among them, 23 are from Industrial Design majors, 29 are from Materials Engineering majors, and 20 are from Electrical Engineering majors.

For details of the independent variables, dependent variables and the number of students tested in the measurement comparisons, please refer to Table 3 .

Measurement Variables and Number of Students Tested.

In addition, it should be noted in this paper that, due to factors such as students’ unwillingness, the research group were not able to collect any questionnaires from the students majoring in Business Management whether they participated in the interdisciplinary program or not.

2.2.2. Interview

Interview Design

The purpose of these interviews is to verify whether the teachers’ observations of the students participating in the interdisciplinary program are consistent with the students’ self-assessments of their own interdisciplinary integration ability. In this way, the research group can more objectively understand the differences in learning outcomes and learning status between the interdisciplinary students and non-interdisciplinary students of various majors and discuss what factors may affect the improvement of student interdisciplinary integration ability based on these differences. In order to more comprehensively grasp the learning conditions of the students participating in the interdisciplinary program, the research group decided to conduct focus group interviews. When considering the focuses of these interviews, in order to avoid the situation that the respondents may be induced by the vocabulary with a specific connotation, the research group did not place related words mentioned above such as students’ “learning methods, expectations, individual traits, prior experience, learning motivation, and maturity” in the questions when designing the discussion guide. An open-ended interview structure has been introduced to avoid any leading questions or guided answers. The clues are as follows:

Q1. What is the classroom atmosphere during class?

Q2. What is the performance of students in course learning and task completion? Are there any significant differences among them in this regard? Are the students of various majors the same in this regard?

Q3. When the courses are over, can the students achieve the ability target set when the courses were opened? If not, what is the reason? Are the students of various majors the same in this regard?

Interview Process

A total of 9 staff members (Pt-1 to Pt-9) from Industrial Design, Economics, Materials Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and other disciplines were invited to the interviews. They are teachers of the interdisciplinary program, tutors of the interdisciplinary students, and program and teaching administrators. The respondents were asked to answer questions and have discussions according to the above clues based on their knowledge of the students in higher grades participating in the interdisciplinary program. These interviews were open-ended, and all the respondents fully expressed their opinions without any pressure or inducement. A total of 9 respondents have been interviewed, with the full process of interviews completed in 4 separated durations. The interviews were recorded only upon the agreement by the respondents. A total of 5 h, 49 min, and 13 s of audio recordings were produced.

Interview Analytical Methods

All the interview recordings were transcribed verbatim. Questions, explanations of questions, and follow-up questions in the verbatim transcript were removed, followed by a coding analysis of the verbatim transcript. The coding analysis was made within the theoretical framework of interdisciplinary integration ability, student attributes, and interdisciplinary learning environment discussed in the first part of this paper. After open coding, the textual material produced 185 units of thematic encoding distributed over 86 nodes. The same unit of thematic coding may belong to different nodes, but the same node can only be categorized into one subcategory and cannot be categorized into another subcategory. Therefore, through further summarization, mergence, and sorting, 18 subcategories were formed, and 8 categories were finally extracted. Due to the failure of sample collection of student coursework that can directly reflect students’ interdisciplinary ability, we could only rely on teachers’ judgments and subjective evaluations to understand students’ interdisciplinary learning and to infer the improvement of their interdisciplinary integration ability. Therefore, the research group used the three dimensions of “learning condition feedback, student attributes, and learning environment” to carry out axial coding of the 8 categories, instead of “interdisciplinary integration ability, student attributes, and learning environment”.

To ensure the high reliability of the initial open coding, the research assistants randomly selected 20% of the interview data for coding and compared it with the previous coding of the same part, finding no significant difference.

3.1. Self-Assessment Results of Student Core Interdisciplinary Integration Ability

This study compares the core interdisciplinary integration ability among the students in the Departments of Industrial Design, Materials, and Electrical Engineering who have not participated in the university’s interdisciplinary program and the students who have participated in the program. Questionnaires were distributed to the students in the Departments of Industrial Design, Electrical Engineering, and Materials, and interdisciplinary students, and a total of 91 valid questionnaires were collected. Among them, 23 are from Industrial Design students, 29 are from Materials students, 20 are from Electrical Engineering students, and 19 are from interdisciplinary students (including three from Industrial Design majors, four from Media Design majors, five from Materials Engineering majors, three from Mechanical Engineering majors, one from Electrical Engineering major, and three from Computer Science and Engineering majors). After sorting out the questionnaire data of the four different groups of students, the quantitative statistical method of one-way ANOVA was used for analysis. Please refer to Table 4 for the results.

Results of the One-Way ANOVA.

The quantitative analysis results of the students in the three sub-ability measurements of communication, reflection, and practice (see Table 4 ) show that a total of five questions indicate significant differences: Interdisciplinary Communication 2, Interdisciplinary Communication 5, Interdisciplinary Reflection 1, Interdisciplinary Reflection 3, and Interdisciplinary Practice 1. This means that each of the five questions can show significant differences in core interdisciplinary integration ability among the students of at least two or more disciplines. Post hoc multiple comparisons were required to explore specific situations. In addition, the results of the test of homogeneity of variances (see Table 5 ) show that Interdisciplinary Communication 3, Reflection 4, Practice 4 and Practice 5 all have the characteristics of heterogeneity of variance, which indicates the distribution of the samples of the above four questions, i.e., the degree of dispersion is very significantly heterogeneous. Therefore, in the case of multiple comparisons, these four questions needed to be tested by the Games–Howell method instead of the Scheffe method ( Mamiseishvili et al. 2016 ). The results of the multiple comparisons indicate that although there are significant differences in the previous One-way ANOVA, Communication 2, Reflection 3, and Practice 1 do not show any significant differences in multiple comparisons, and finally only Interdisciplinary Communication 5, Interdisciplinary Reflection 1, and Interdisciplinary Practice 4 show significant differences (see Table 6 for details). The specific findings are as follows: the scores of Industrial Design students and Materials Engineering students in Communication 5 are significantly higher than those of Electrical Engineering students, and their means show the relation of “Industrial Design students > Materials students > interdisciplinary students > Electrical Engineering students”, but the first three student groups do not show any significant difference, and there is no significant difference between interdisciplinary students and Electrical Engineering students. In Reflection 1, the means of the four student groups in core interdisciplinary integration ability show the relation of “Industrial Design students > interdisciplinary students > Materials students > Electrical Engineering students”, in which only the scores of Industrial Design students are significantly higher than those of Electrical Engineering students. There is no other significant difference in Reflection 1, and in other words, interdisciplinary students and Materials Engineering students are not significantly different from Industrial Design students or Electrical Engineering students, and meanwhile, there is no significant difference between interdisciplinary students and Materials Engineering students either. Practice 4 reflects the same situation as Reflection 1: the means of the four student groups in core interdisciplinary integration ability show the relation of “Industrial Design students > interdisciplinary students > Materials students > Electrical Engineering students”, and only the scores of Industrial Design students are significantly higher than those of Electrical Engineering students, and there is no significant difference among other student groups.

Results of the Test of Homogeneity of Variance.

Results of the Post Hoc Tests: Multiple Comparisons.

* represents Sig. < .05, InterD = Interdisciplinary, EE = Electrical Engineering, ID = Industrial Design, ME = Mechanical Engineering.

Students in the four groups show significant differences in only three out of the 16 questions of core interdisciplinary integration ability, and in these three questions, interdisciplinary students are not significantly different from any other student groups, which prevents us from drawing the conclusion that interdisciplinary students are significantly better than other students in core interdisciplinary integration ability. This result is surprising. Why the students participating in the interdisciplinary program do not have outstanding related ability deserves further discussions by the research group.

3.2. Qualitative Analysis Results of Teacher Interviews

Table 7 shows how many times the codes covering three dimensions (D-01 to D-03) were mentioned and how many teachers mentioned them. Among them, “Learning Condition Feedback” (D-01) was mentioned 36 times by six teachers in total, and it includes two categories (D-01-01 to D-01-02) and five subcategories (D-01-01a to D-01-02c); “Interdisciplinary Learning Environment” was mentioned 41 times by seven teachers in total, and it includes three categories (D-02-01 to D-02-03) and six subcategories (D-02-01a to D-02-03b); “Student Attributes” was mentioned 108 times by eight teachers in total, and it includes three categories (D-03-01 to D-03-03) and seven subcategories (D-03-01a to D-03-03b).

Codes and Frequencies.

In order to find shared feelings of the respondents, we only analyzed subcategories mentioned by two or more respondents. There are 15 subcategories (D-01-01a, D-01-02a to D-01-02c, D-02-01a to D-02-02b, D-03-01a to D-03-03b) and seven categories (D-01-01, D-01-02, D-02-01, D-02-02, D-03-01 to D-03-03) involved. The frequencies of the three main axis dimensions and seven categories are shown in Table 8 . The specifics of each main axis dimension will be explained in order.

Frequency Proportion and Ranking of Each Dimension and Category Mentioned.

3.2.1. D-01 Learning Condition Feedback

This dimension includes the description and evaluation made by the teachers being interviewed on the behavioral performance of the interdisciplinary integration ability of the students participating in the interdisciplinary program. In the dimension, the teachers gave specific feedback on students’ interdisciplinary values, interdisciplinary knowledge integration, interdisciplinary teamwork, interdisciplinary communication, and interdisciplinary team consensus building, as well as students’ words, deeds, and emotions under the program. This dimension, including the two categories of positive feedback and negative feedback identified by their positive and negative connotations, was mentioned 36 times in total by six respondents successively.

In the category of “D-01-01 Positive Feedback”, only the subcategory of “D-01-01a” was mentioned by two respondents. It mainly records the two teachers’ recognition of the growth of some students in interdisciplinary learning, including overcoming the difficulties in interdisciplinary communication, reaching an interdisciplinary team consensus, and being willing to carry out interdisciplinary teamwork practice. They clearly stated that they have seen the students’ growth in interdisciplinary ability (see Appendix B ). We therefore named D-01-01a “Growth in Interdisciplinary Integration Ability”. Unfortunately, positive feedback is the least among the seven categories in terms of the number of respondents who mention it and the frequency of mentions.

The category of “D-01-02 Negative Feedback” includes three subcategories: “D-01-02a, D-01-02b, and D-01-02c”. Six out of the nine respondents talked about the problems and negative words, deeds and emotions of students in higher grades in interdisciplinary learning from different perspectives (see Appendix B ). D-01-02a mainly reflects that the students still do not understand or agree with interdisciplinary values after participating in the interdisciplinary program; some students have interdisciplinary communication barriers and need to rely on their teachers to interpret and explain interdisciplinary knowledge. These all reflect that the students are still far from the acquisition of interdisciplinary integration ability. Thus, we named D-01-02a “Problems with Interdisciplinary Ability”. D-01-02b was mentioned by two teachers, and it mainly describes students’ doubts or distrusts during interdisciplinary learning. They not only distrust interdisciplinary learning, but also have no confidence in teachers of other disciplines and in this program. We can understand that the students cannot accept the views and values of other disciplines, but we are very surprised to find that teachers of other disciplines and even the program itself cannot be trusted. As a result, we also listed this subcategory and named it “Student Distrust” instead of classifying it into the subcategory of “Problems with Interdisciplinary Ability”. A total of three teachers mentioned the subcategory of D-01-02c, and they mainly talked about students’ frustration, emotional ventilation, and withdrawal from the interdisciplinary program due to the intensity of the courses, the gap between expectations and perceived reality, and problems with teamwork. These are indeed negative phenomena that students experience during interdisciplinary learning, so we named this subcategory “Negative Emotions and Behaviors”.

Based on the above analyses, negative feedback was mentioned 28 times by six respondents, which is significantly more than the positive feedback. Within the dimension of “Learning Condition Feedback”, the frequency proportion of negative feedback accounts for 77.8%, which is more than three times that of positive feedback. From the analysis of this feedback, we believe that the overall improvement of students’ interdisciplinary integration ability under this program is not satisfactory.

3.2.2. D-02 Interdisciplinary Learning Environment

The dimension obtained after the axial coding was mentioned 41 times by seven respondents. Two categories of “D-02-01” and “D-02-02” were mentioned by more than two respondents. In this dimension, the respondents described students’ feedback on the difficulty of interdisciplinary courses, the learning pressure imposed by the interdisciplinary teachers, the increased learning burden of interdisciplinary courses, and the influence of non-interdisciplinary teachers on the students participating in the interdisciplinary courses. Based on the previous discussion on the literature of “interdisciplinary learning environment”, we coded this dimension as “Interdisciplinary Learning Environment”.

The subcategories of D-02-01 include: D-02-01a and D-02-01b. D-02-01a was mentioned eight times by four respondents based on all the written materials of this study. The interviewed teachers described that the students reported that the basic design courses under this interdisciplinary program feature high-intensity learning, the engineering courses are too difficult to understand, so that they felt huge learning pressure, resulting in the negative emotions or behaviors mentioned above (see Appendix C for details). Hence, we named this sub-category “Study Pressure”. D-02-01b was mentioned 19 times by six respondents. The interdisciplinary teachers found that after a period of interdisciplinary learning, some students think that they have consumed too much time or energy in interdisciplinary learning instead of in their own discipline; and they worried that the final scores of the interdisciplinary courses will lower their average score, etc., all of which make students perceive interdisciplinary learning as a burden to their own discipline study (see Appendix C ). Based on this, we named the subcategory “Academic Burden”, and the category of D-02-01 including the two subcategories of “D-02-01a Study Pressure and D-02-01b Academic Burden” “Pressure and Burden”.

The subcategories of D-02-02 include: D-02-02a and D-02-02b. D-02-02a was mentioned 10 times by three teachers. The respondents mainly mentioned the influence of teachers of mono-disciplines on students’ disciplinary thinking, which mostly features contempt or rejection of interdisciplinary values (see Appendix C ). This seems to challenge students’ interdisciplinary values, and indeed affects students’ cognition, judgment and persistence in interdisciplinary learning to a considerable extent. Therefore, this subcategory was named “Influence of Departments”. D-02-02b was mentioned five times by five respondents. In this subcategory, the respondents mainly mentioned that when the students are switching between interdisciplinary courses and disciplinary courses under this program, the teachers of different disciplines have different evaluation criteria for the output of the same student, which can bring frustration and value conflicts to the students participating in the interdisciplinary program. Some students cannot adapt to, identify with, or accept different judging standards (see Appendix C ). Therefore, D-02-02b was named “Differences among Disciplines”.

Among the three main axis dimensions, interdisciplinary learning environment has the second highest number of respondents who mentioned it and the frequency of mentions. Two categories of D02-01 and D02-02 were both mentioned by six respondents. The former has a frequency of 19, and the frequency proportion within this dimension accounts for 46.3%; the latter has a frequency of 15, and the frequency proportion within this dimension accounts for 36.6%. In this dimension, the frequency difference between the two categories is about 10%. Based on this, we believe that the impact of interdisciplinary students’ learning pressure and burden may bring the respondents a stronger feeling than that of differences between disciplines. However, in any case, the interviews reveal such a finding, i.e., the intensity, pressure, and burden felt by the students in interdisciplinary learning, the unsupportive teachers of their own disciplines against interdisciplinary learning, and differences among disciplines are closely related to “D01-02 Negative Feedback” mentioned in the previous axis dimension.

3.2.3. D-03 Student Attributes

This dimension records the judgments made by the interviewed teachers on the students’ learning motivation, and the speculation and description of the motivational causes after observing the students’ interdisciplinary learning status. It also includes a description of the impact of students’ experiences before being involved in the interdisciplinary program on their interdisciplinary learning, and the impact of students’ individual traits, such as personal characteristics, learning habits, and learning responsibility on their interdisciplinary learning. According to the discussion of “student attributes” in the first part of this paper, we named this dimension “Student Attributes”. The number of respondents who mentioned the dimension is the most and the frequency of mentions is the highest among the three dimensions. The topic of student attributes was mentioned 108 times in total by eight respondents successively. This dimension includes three categories: “D03-01, D03-02, and D03-03”.

In this dimension, the respondents talked about the phenomena of students lacking motivation, dawdling their time away, and being unwilling to participate in interdisciplinary learning, and believed that students lack interdisciplinary learning motivation. Meanwhile, the teachers made some interpretations and analyses of the reasons for the lack of motivation of the students (see Appendix D ). Therefore, we named D03-01 “Motivation”. The number of respondents who mentioned D03-01 Motivation is the most and the frequency of mentions is the highest among the three categories. It was mentioned 56 times by eight respondents. The category of D03-01 Motivation includes three subcategories: “D03-01a, D03-01b, and D03-01c”. Self-determination theory suggests that pure curiosity or a desire to master can be called intrinsic motivation; all the other behaviors are driven by extrinsic motivation, derived from the integration and internalization of social values or rules ( Cook and Artino 2016 ). Based on this, we classified the phenomena of the students’ lacking motivation, dawdling their time away, and being unwilling to participate in interdisciplinary learning, as well as other related phenomena of a lack of motivation into the subcategory of D03-01a, and named it “Intrinsic Motivation”. D03-01a was mentioned 38 times by eight respondents successively. In addition, two respondents mentioned the incentives or restraints that are intended to stimulate students’ extrinsic motivations and suggested that these extrinsic motivations can be transformed into students’ intrinsic motivations. This was encoded into D03-01b and named “Extrinsic Motivation”. The reasons for the lack of motivation mentioned by the teachers, including students’ identification with the teachers, whether interdisciplinary learning can meet their short-term realistic goals, and interdisciplinary learning’s relevance to their own disciplines were encoded into D03-01c and named “Source of Motivation”. The subcategory of D03-01c was mentioned by six respondents.

In the category of D03-02, the respondents talked about the students’ incompatibility with the teaching methods not belonging to their own discipline, and their unaccustomedness and irritation of PBL teaching when taking Capstone courses due to their lack of prior interdisciplinary learning experience. In addition, the students do not have similar experiences in social cognition and life practice before participating in interdisciplinary learning, especially before taking the interdisciplinary integration courses in the upper grades. In fact, they showed confusion about interdisciplinary cognition both before and after participating in the program (see Appendix D ). The research team named this coding category “Prior Experience”. Meanwhile, the text content about interdisciplinary learning incompatibility due to the lack of prior learning experience was coded as the subcategory of “D-03-02a” and named “Influence of Prior Teaching and Learning Styles”; the relevant text content about the lack of interdisciplinary cognition in previous social cognition and life practice was coded as the subcategory of “D-03-02b”, and named “Prior Interdisciplinary Practice Experience and Cognition”. The number of respondents who mentioned D03-02 Prior Experience is the second most and the frequency of mentions is the second highest among the three categories. It was mentioned 29 times by seven respondents. D-03-02a was mentioned 21 times by six respondents. D-03-02b was mentioned 8 times by three respondents. The students from the Department of Design and the students from the Department of Engineering were compared, and it can be seen that different prior teaching styles of the two disciplines lead to different adaption conditions of the students after participating in the interdisciplinary program. For example, design students already have problem-oriented learning experience when they study in their own disciplines. Meanwhile, due to the nature of design disciplines, design students have more opportunities to be exposed to some interdisciplinary knowledge. As a result, design students are more adaptable in interdisciplinary learning, while students in other disciplines are the opposite. The teachers believed that the students’ lack of interdisciplinary experience and cognition before participating in the interdisciplinary program influences the formation of their interdisciplinary values or awareness, which may be one of the factors that cause the students to be at a loss or even withdraw from the program when facing interdisciplinary learning.

In the category of D03-03, the respondents reflected different characteristics of students in different departments in interdisciplinary learning; according to the content of the relevant text, the research group coded it as “D-03-03a” and named it “Different Characteristics of Students in Different Departments”. Besides, we coded the content about the impact of student personal characteristics like sense of responsibility, learning attitudes on interdisciplinary learning as D-03-03b, and named it “Student Personal Characteristics”. For the category of D03-03 that includes D-03-03a and D-03-03b, we named it “Individual Traits” (see Appendix D ). Although the number of respondents who mentioned D03-03 and the frequency of mentions are the least among the three categories of the dimension of Student Attributes, it was mentioned 23 times by five respondents. D-03-03a was mentioned 10 times by three respondents. D-03-03b was mentioned 13 times by five respondents. From the encoded text, some interdisciplinary learning conditions of Engineering, Design, and Business students can be seen, and it is found that different student characteristics shaped by different discipline education also seem to have an impact on interdisciplinary learning. For example, Engineering students are relatively not good at communication, while Design students are more creative, and Business students are considered to be more inclined to take shortcuts in interdisciplinary learning. From the text of the encoded unit, it can be seen that the teachers felt that the students’ own personal characteristics, learning attitudes, and sense of responsibility can also have an impact on interdisciplinary learning (see Appendix D ).

As mentioned above, the number of respondents who mentioned the dimension of Student Attributes is the most and the frequency of mentions is the highest among the three main axis dimensions. The frequencies of the three categories of “D03-01 Motivation, D03-02 Prior Experience, and D03-03 Individual Traits” are respectively 51.9%, 26.9%, and 21.3%. Among all the categories, the frequency proportion of Motivation accounts for 30.3%, the frequency proportion of Prior Experience accounts for 15.7%, and the frequency proportion of Individual Traits accounts for 12.4%. According to the interview transcript, the space of the dimension of Student Attributes is the greatest. It can be said that student attributes should have a very important relation with interdisciplinary learning outcomes, and they can play a key role in student interdisciplinary integration ability.

4. Discussion

The purpose of this study is to empirically explore whether there is significant difference in interdisciplinary integration ability between the undergraduate students participating in the interdisciplinary program that integrates design, engineering, and business, and the students studying a single discipline, and to discuss the reasons for the differences. To this end, the research group invited 91 students for self-assessment analyses of core interdisciplinary integration ability and nine teachers and related staff members involved in the interdisciplinary program to interviews on the conditions of the group of interdisciplinary students. The experimental data were obtained through quantitative comparative analyses and qualitative coding analyses. The results of quantitative analyses show that the students participating in the interdisciplinary program are not significantly different from those of other disciplines in the ability level of “interdisciplinary communication, interdisciplinary reflection, and interdisciplinary practice”. The results of qualitative analyses show that the teachers’ negative feedback on the interdisciplinary students is significantly more than positive feedback in the number of respondents who mentioned it and frequency of mentions. Meanwhile, through qualitative analyses, it is found that the interdisciplinary students’ disagreement with interdisciplinary values, distrust of interdisciplinary teachers, obstacles in interdisciplinary communication, and problems with teamwork. Therefore, the research team believes that the improvement of the students in ability after participating in interdisciplinary learning is not ideal. This clearly echo their insignificant interdisciplinary integration ability in the interdisciplinary integration ability measurements. Based on the results of the data analyses, we believe that the results of the qualitative analyses can confirm the objectivity of the students’ self-assessment results to a considerable extent. Based on this finding, we are more inclined to assert that there is no necessarily significant difference in interdisciplinary integration ability between the students participating in the interdisciplinary program and the students studying a single discipline. This may not support the research conclusion that student interdisciplinary integration ability is closely related to interdisciplinary course participation, or that students involved in interdisciplinary learning have better interdisciplinary integration ability than students studying a single discipline ( Y.-Y. Li and Lin 2018 ; Newell 1992 ; Wright 1992 ). However, this finding is similar to the findings of the 2017 study by Lattuca et al. Their research shows that students of interdisciplinary learning are not necessarily better than students of monodisciplinary learning in interdisciplinary-related abilities, and students’ acquisition of the ability may not necessarily change significantly due to the interdisciplinary characteristics ( Lattuca et al. 2017b ). Lattuca et al. also pointed out that their findings are consistent with evidence from Jacobs’ analysis of Arum et al.’s data ( Lattuca et al. 2017b ).

What causes this insignificant difference? Soares believed that curriculum designers often seem to underestimate the support that students need in interdisciplinary learning ( Soares et al. 2013 ). Borrggo et al. suggested that the design of course projects should avoid as much as possible the frustration of students due to overly difficult problem tasks ( Borrego et al. 2013 ). In fact, the research of Soares, Borrego et al. confirmed the systematic relation between interdisciplinary teaching and learning summarized by Spelt et al. through literature review, i.e., the impact of student attributes and interdisciplinary learning environment on interdisciplinary integration ability ( Spelt et al. 2009 ). This does echo our findings. The results of the quantitative analyses and the feedback of learning conditions in the qualitative analyses should reflect the level of student interdisciplinary integration ability. In the qualitative analyses of these interviews, student attributes, including motivation, prior experience, and individual traits, and the interdisciplinary learning environment, including pressure and burden, and disciplinary factors, should be the influencing factors of student interdisciplinary integration ability. Meanwhile, from the analyses of the frequency of mentions in the coding analysis research, student attributes’ impact on interdisciplinary learning is significantly more than the interdisciplinary learning environment; and for each category, their influence from more to less is respectively: Motivation, Prior Experience, Individual Traits, Pressure and Burden, and Disciplinary Factors. We will further explore these five categories further below.

In our interviews, the teachers pointed out that the students are unwilling to participate in the interdisciplinary program and dawdle their time away during interdisciplinary learning due to their lack of identification with interdisciplinary learning; students may join the program for some other reasons, so they are not very active; students think that they have spent time on interdisciplinary learning, but it does not help achieve their short-term goals, so they naturally withdraw from the program; students feel that they have spent energy on interdisciplinary learning, but the results are not satisfactory, and they are worried that their average score will be lowered, so they have negative reactions. Clearly, these are manifestations of a lack of motivation in interdisciplinary learning (see Appendix D for details). Motivation is defined as the process of initiating and maintaining goal-directed activities, while the goal-directed theory states that learners tend to engage in tasks related to mastering content or to do better than others or to avoid failure ( Cook and Artino 2016 ). In addition, as an important part of motivational structure, self-efficacy ( Lishinski et al. 2016 ) determines how much effort people are willing to put in, as well as people’s ability to cope and persevere in the face of challenges and difficulties ( Bandura 1977 ). The discussion of motivation by Cook, Lishinski, and Bandura et al. should be sufficient to explain the impact of students’ lack of motivation for interdisciplinary learning. Therefore, whether from the frequency results of the qualitative analyses or from previous research on learning motivation, perhaps the primary task of interdisciplinary education should be the cultivation, shaping, and enhancement of learning motivation.

How can we shape or enhance student motivation for interdisciplinary learning? In the interviews, some teachers mentioned that students may need to know what kind of ability the interdisciplinary program is designed to cultivate, or what they may get after completing the program, which may be important motivation to support them to continue their studies. In this regard, some researchers pointed out that understanding the utility and importance of interdisciplinary learning is very important for student interdisciplinary learning outcomes ( Chen et al. 2009 ; Matthews et al. 2010 ). In addition, Keller pointed out that establishing students’ motivation to learn requires successfully establishing the relevance of teaching to students as an individual ( Keller 1987 ). In fact, the respondents reported that they have conveyed under the interdisciplinary program to the students the idea that interdisciplinary learning is more conducive to acquiring the ability and vision of innovation and entrepreneurship, but this does not seem to be related to students’ more realistic short-term goals of furthering their study, going abroad, finding a job, or improving their average score of their own discipline, so they fail to convince these students to realize the importance of interdisciplinarity. Obviously, this relatively superficial interdisciplinary concept transfer has not successfully established the relevance of teaching to students. This may be one of the reasons for not effectively stimulating students’ motivation for interdisciplinary learning. This is similar to the findings of Self et al.’s 2019 study, i.e., compared with British students, Korean students cannot be identified with the interdisciplinary nature of a particular occupation, and they are particularly concerned about the appropriateness of interdisciplinary education in terms of employment, its negative impact on employment, and are worried about whether interdisciplinary education will be valued by discipline-oriented industries. Self et al. believed that different regional cultures may influence students’ driving force of interdisciplinary learning ( Self et al. 2019 ). Based on this, we infer that the students in East Asia may be more concerned about the relevance of interdisciplinary learning and the realization of short-term goals. In interdisciplinary education, the shaping or enhancement of student learning motivation should focus on this. In addition, judging from the introduction to the course teaching mentioned in the second part of this paper, for the students from different disciplines, the interdisciplinary basic courses under this program still use the original traditional teaching methods of each college. We speculate that this is bound to make it difficult for the students to establish the relevance of their own disciplines and interdisciplinary course teaching. Meanwhile, the original teaching methods of various disciplines retained in the teaching of interdisciplinary basic introductory courses have turned the teaching of interdisciplinary basic courses into multi-disciplinary teaching of disciplines plus disciplines, and fail to promote the integration of knowledge, methods, and viewpoints of various disciplines, which may make it difficult for the students from different disciplines to have effective interdisciplinary communication and interdisciplinary teamwork under this program. As Keller once pointed out, students’ effective learning and expectations of success are hindered, which will also lead to a decrease in learning motivation ( Keller 1987 ). Therefore, although this program has interdisciplinary integration courses in the later stage, it still uses the traditional teaching methods in the interdisciplinary basic introductory courses in the early stage, which should also be the reasons that lead to the lack of students’ motivation and the hinderance of the improvement of students’ interdisciplinary integration ability.

Prior Experience

The courses students have taken can significantly influence their learning experience ( Chen et al. 2009 ). The experience may affect student interdisciplinary learning. Spelt et al. pointed out that past social and educational experience, such as students’ previous thinking styles, the teaching styles they have been exposed to, and beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning, may impact their interdisciplinary integration ability and thinking ( Spelt et al. 2009 ). In our interviews, some teachers mentioned that students are not used to the teaching methods of the interdisciplinary teachers; if the students do not start to get used to the teaching methods in their freshman year, it will be hard for them to be adapted to them in their junior year; the engineering students cannot adapt to problem-oriented learning in basic design courses, and cannot understand teaching methods that do not have the best solution to problems in integrated courses; the students have no successful experience in innovation and entrepreneurship, so it will be difficult for them to understand and identify with the teachers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary learning(see Appendix D for details). In contrast, design students, as mentioned above, have more opportunities to be exposed to interdisciplinary knowledge, have earlier problem-oriented learning experiences, and are more adaptable to interdisciplinary learning. Meanwhile, judging from the quantitative results of students’ ability, non-interdisciplinary design students have significant performance in Communication 5, Reflection 1, and Practice 4 in the questions can also explain this. The information gathered supports Spelt et al.’s perspective. Based on this, the authors infer that students may experience discomfort or confusion in new learning due to differences in their previous study habits or teachers’ teaching styles. Meanwhile, the lack of specific interdisciplinary experience will lead to students’ failure in interdisciplinary value formation, which is not conducive to the construction of interdisciplinary learning motivation and the improvement of interdisciplinary integration ability level. This is consistent with Ramalingam et al.’s point that student self-efficacy and academic performance are positively related to their prior experience ( Ramalingam et al. 2004 ), i.e., the amount of prior experience affects the amount of student’s interdisciplinary learning motivation and how much the learning effectiveness will be improved. On the other hand, as far as learning is concerned, researchers in the field of cognitive theory believed that how new information is organized and interrelated with previous knowledge has an important impact on learning, and interdisciplinary teachers should help students create a clear link between what they are going to learn and their prior experience, including what they have learned in the past ( Lattuca et al. 2004 ). We obtained similar confirmation from the discussion of motivation in the previous part of this paper. In practice, however, it is not an easy task for interdisciplinary teachers to correlate students’ experience before and after interdisciplinary learning. It can be seen from the interviews that it is especially difficult for interdisciplinary teaching practitioners to understand and organize students’ prior non-educational experience. Therefore, interdisciplinary education should be regarded as a long-term process, and students should be exposed to interdisciplinary learning earlier to have interdisciplinary experience, which may gradually build students’ interdisciplinary cognition, establish their interdisciplinary values, facilitate the growth of interdisciplinary learning motivation, and promote the improvement of interdisciplinary integration ability. In this regard, Wilhelmsson et al. have the same understanding: the acquisition of interdisciplinary integration ability is a process that must start early in education ( Wilhelmsson et al. 2009 ).

Individual Traits

The results of the interview analyses of this category show that the students majoring in Engineering, Management, and Design have different focuses and ways of dealing with problems in interdisciplinary learning, and the impact of their learning attitudes on learning outcomes. Several teachers pointed out that in interdisciplinary learning, Engineering students seem to be more conservative, so they think in a less creative way; Design students are original and have many ideas, but their consideration of practical application may be incomprehensive; Business students intend to save effort in their learning, and they often avoid wasting energy, time, and other learning risks. In this regard, some teachers pointed out that it is easier for the students to believe the value that is easier for them to understand or is more similar to their own major. On the other hand, the teachers believed that a serious attitude, a sense of responsibility and self-discipline reflected in students’ individual traits are still important factors for positive outcomes in interdisciplinary learning. Especially students who are willing to use what they have learned to analyze and organize can be a high achiever in the end (see Appendix D for details). It may be inferred that the values or learning styles of different disciplines affect students’ perspectives on problems and the learning strategies and actions they take. Meanwhile, students’ individual traits also seem to affect their own learning strategies, and thus affect the final interdisciplinary learning outcomes. Some researchers believed that disciplines affect the learning methods students adopt over time ( Tarabashkina and Lietz 2011 ). The study by Bruce et al. found that for successful interdisciplinary learning, personalities and attitudes should be at least as important as disciplinary foundations and specialization. They believed that an excellent interdisciplinary person should have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and they should not prematurely narrow a problem to a limited set of dimensions, but instead, they should spend time exploring a range of dimensions and testing several potential boundaries; therefore, they also believed that an ideal interdisciplinary person should have curiosity about and willingness to learn other disciplines, and be open to the ideas and experience from other disciplines, etc. ( Bruce et al. 2004 ). In this regard, Woods also believed that curiosity and openness represent a willingness to suspend doubts about other disciplinary cultures and suspend a hold on beliefs in their own disciplinary culture ( Woods 2007 ). Tik believed that openness refers to the characteristics of students who are curious and intelligent. They are open to new experiences and willing to adopt other learning strategies; while responsibility refers to the characteristics of achievement, organization and perseverance, and students with these traits tend to be more inclined to use higher-order cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and metacognition ( Tik 2020 ). Therefore, both students’ own individual traits and their characteristics caused by discipline attributes should have an impact on their interdisciplinary learning outcomes. Meanwhile, as shown in Table 7 , the influence of students’ individual traits is greater than students’ characteristics caused by discipline attributes based on the number of respondents who mentioned them and the frequencies of mentions. Together with the previous research on student learning attitudes, this may show that the influence of student individual traits is slightly more important than the influence of student discipline characteristics on interdisciplinary learning outcomes.

Pressure and Burden

The interview materials of this category reflect that the intensity of learning and the increased strictness of teachers’ demands for task completion appear to lead to negative effects on student interdisciplinary learning. For example, the teachers pointed out that the students reported that the courses in the department of Design bring a heavy course load, and the courses given by the teachers of the department of Engineering are too in-depth, so that the students feel a heavy burden; in the later integrated courses, the students cannot accept the course output requirements and strictness of the teachers. In addition, students’ inadaptation of interdisciplinary learning also causes them to worry that their academic GPA will be lowered, so they think interdisciplinary learning is a burden for them, and eventually many students withdraw from the program (see Appendix C for details). This finding may be supported by Matthews et al. They embed programming teaching content in the study of first-year Biology undergraduates and required students to apply their programming skills in a quantitative real-world setting. However, it was too complex for the students to respond effectively, so the students’ feedback on this were negative to a large extent ( Matthews et al. 2010 ). Moreover, Chen et al. have similar findings. They pointed out that a heavy study load increases the difficulty of students participating in various courses outside their own discipline and reduces their attention paid to interdisciplinary learning. Meanwhile, this may be a reason for the declining trend of students’ interest and value in interdisciplinary learning ( Chen et al. 2009 ). Indeed, judging from the total credits of undergraduate majors in the three colleges of the school, each major has 150 credits, and participating in this interdisciplinary program will add 35 credits, which is equivalent to adding more than four credits per semester and 70 credit hours of lessons. In fact, the number of all the courses is not evenly distributed in each semester. If the interdisciplinary teachers have higher requirements on coursework and put more pressure on their students, especially in certain semesters with more class hours, students will definitely feel the weight of a heavier study load, and as a result, they will naturally choose to give up interdisciplinary learning to ensure their own disciplinary learning. Therefore, when designing interdisciplinary curriculum content and student output requirements, teachers should comprehensively consider the pressure and burden brought to students by the learning load of both interdisciplinary courses and the courses of their own discipline. This requires more adequate and effective communication and coordination between interdisciplinary teachers and teachers of different disciplines, in order to bring positive effects on student learning outcomes.

Disciplinary Factors

Teachers’ disciplinary views and biases can influence how students learn and experience in interdisciplinary learning ( Self et al. 2019 ). Self et al. found that some teachers’ own disciplinary biases can be transformed into their expectations for students, which leads students to change their learning methods and learning outcomes in their studies to meet the expectations of disciplinary teachers. Our research findings support this view. The interview participants indicated that disciplinary teachers are accustomed to using their values to influence students. They lack support for the students participating in interdisciplinary courses. For example, non-interdisciplinary teachers show their inhibition or contempt for interdisciplinarity or the interdisciplinary program before the students being involved in interdisciplinary leaning when teaching their own disciplinary courses, so that the students have distrust of interdisciplinary courses and teachers. In fact, this attitude of disciplinary teachers towards interdisciplinary learning should be relatively common. First, teachers who lack interdisciplinary experience may also lack enthusiasm or willingness to develop interdisciplinary projects ( Gardner et al. 2014 ; Van den Beemt et al. 2020 ). Second, the academic community and higher education community generally regard disciplines as cornerstones, so they tend to marginalize more comprehensive areas of knowledge or educational programs ( Palaiologou 2010 ). Brew suggested in his research that many scholars tend to overemphasize the importance of disciplinary affiliation ( Brew 2008 ). In this regard, Lindvig et al. believed that interdisciplinary teaching, which is different from the accustomed way of disciplinary teaching, may be regarded as a threat to hinder the construction of the disciplinary identity, so this should be one of the difficulties that interdisciplinary teaching is facing ( Lindvig and Ulriksen 2019 ). Obviously, the influence of teachers’ words and deeds based on disciplinary thinking and values brings challenges to students in interdisciplinary learning. In the operation and management of interdisciplinary programs, schools need to establish common interdisciplinary educational values among teachers of various disciplines to avoid negative impact on interdisciplinary teaching by disciplinary teachers who are not involved in interdisciplinary teaching. In addition, some respondents pointed out that Design teachers and Engineering teachers have different evaluation criteria for student outputs, which has led to students’ frustration in interdisciplinary learning. For example, Engineering students’ award-winning works in disciplinary competitions cannot be recognized by Design teachers (see Appendix C for details). This is consistent with the findings of Self et al., and in their study, professors of Industrial Design rarely collaborate with professors of Ergonomics, and the differences between these two disciplines have an impact on course learning outcomes. What is considered important by everyone is not considered important in Ergonomics ( Self et al. 2019 ). If such disparities between disciplines are not balanced and integrated to form judging criteria based on a shared value, challenges will be created for interdisciplinary learning and teaching.

5. Conclusions

This study uses the Core Interdisciplinary Integration Ability Scale developed by Chen et al. to measure the interdisciplinary integration ability of the students participating in the interdisciplinary program that integrates design, engineering, business and other disciplines. Under the theoretical framework of Biggs, Spelt, and Liu et al. on interdisciplinary learning outcomes, student attributes, and interdisciplinary learning environment, a qualitative analysis of interviews with interdisciplinary teachers and related personnel is conducted. The research group found that there is no significant difference in interdisciplinary integration ability between the students participating in the interdisciplinary program and the students involved in a single discipline study, including the Industrial Design, Electrical Engineering, and Materials Engineering students. Based on the qualitative analysis results of the interview data, the authors believe that the reasons why there is no significant difference may be problems with student attributes, including the lack of motivation, lack of prior interdisciplinary experience, influence of individual traits, and problems with interdisciplinary learning environment, including the increased learning pressure and burden, and interference of disciplinary factors. Our findings can provide some references for the future development and design of interdisciplinary programs and interdisciplinary teaching. Especially for the establishment and shaping of interdisciplinary learning motivation, for students in East Asia, attention should be paid to the substantial connection between students’ short-term goals and interdisciplinary learning, as well as to the construction of the correlation between students’ own disciplines and interdisciplinary learning content; meanwhile, for the interdisciplinary basic course teaching in the early stage of interdisciplinary programs, we should take into account the fact that the students under these programs are from different disciplines, and carry out teaching from the perspective of knowledge integration, so as to avoid using original discipline teaching methods to simply make interdisciplinary teaching into multi-disciplinary teaching. Besides, it may be beneficial to start students’ experience in interdisciplinary learning or research at an earlier stage to gradually form students’ interdisciplinary cognitions and values. In addition, when establishing a teaching design for students, attention should be paid to their individual traits and there should be sufficient communication and coordination with students’ disciplinary teachers to achieve a balance between interdisciplinary and disciplinary learning, form a commonly recognized evaluation standard, and try to avoid negative effects on the learning outcomes of interdisciplinary students due to the increase of students’ learning pressure and academic burden or the interference of disciplinary factors.

Due to the different systems and structures of interdisciplinary programs among universities, this study did not collect data from other universities for comparison. Besides, because of some students’ unwillingness and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the research group did not collect any samples of students majoring in Business Management and all tested students’ opinions on the directness of the interdisciplinary courses in this university. With the graduation of this group of students, the collection of relevant samples has become unlikely. The lack of such sample data makes it difficult for us to truly and directly understand the psychological state and opinions of the students participating in this interdisciplinary program. Only relying on the teachers’ observation, description and evaluation of the students may miss the details of some students’ conditions, resulting in some problems not being discovered in time. This indeed brings about some limitations to this research. Fortunately, the measurement results of students’ interdisciplinary ability and the analysis results of teacher interviews can confirm each other, so this research group believes that our experimental data are convincing. Our findings further confirm the previous view that students participating in interdisciplinary learning may not necessarily improve their interdisciplinary ability. Meanwhile, on this basis, according to the empirical results, this study points out the specific factors that bring interdisciplinary learning challenges to students. This provides inspiration for subsequent related research. In addition, this study only discusses the impact of student attributes and interdisciplinary learning environment on learning outcomes, but from the theoretical model of Biggs et al., learning outcomes can also affect student attributes and learning environment. This will open the way for our future research considering, e.g., how the improvement of students’ interdisciplinary ability will stimulate students’ interdisciplinary motivation.

Core Interdisciplinary Integration Ability Scale Questions.

Compiled and translated from ( Chen et al. 2017 ).

Coding of D-01 Learning Condition Feedback.

Under the principle of not changing the meaning of the respondents’ conversations, in order to show the content of the conversations more accurately, the authors annotate what has been omitted or referred to in the conversations through ( ) according to the context of the interviews.

Coding of D-02 interdisciplinary Learning Environment.

Coding of D-03 Student Attributes.

Funding Statement

The study was financially supported by MOST 110-2410-H-036-005-.

Author Contributions

Data curation, D.-D.X.; formal analysis, K.-Y.W.; investigation, C.X., D.-D.X., W.-Q.L. and K.-Y.W.; methodology, C.X.; project administration, C.-F.W.; supervision, C.-F.W.; writing—original draft, C.X.; writing—review & editing, C.X. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Research Ethics Committee of National Taiwan University (protocol code 202105ES161).

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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