How “Multidisciplinary” Is It? Measuring the Multidisciplinarity of Classes and Student Teams

Abstract

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine recommend that interdisciplinary education be evaluated against relevant criteria such as the number of students from the general population (i.e., from outside the instructor's department) and the mix of students. How is a department, program, or institution to quantify the multidisciplinarity of a class or student team? The number of majors is a simple metric, but it does not capture cognitive distance between majors. Beyond the number of majors and cognitive distance, a measure should also account for the proportion of students in each discipline. To describe the multidisciplinarity of educational programs, we propose the use of the Rao-Stirling diversity index, which has been used to quantify the multidisciplinarity of research papers, authors, research centers, departments, and institutions. The index requires a measure of distances between categories, in this case students' majors. In studies on university research, bibliometric measures are used to determine distances between Web of Science categories, but the categories do not map well to undergraduate student majors. In this paper, we develop a measure of distance between majors at a research institution based on overlap in courses required in each major, and on cross-listings of courses between departments. The distance measures were then used to calculate Rao-Stirling Diversity indexes for 3 multidisciplinary student teams (N = 85; each team included 12-55 students, 5-7 majors, and majors from 2-5 colleges). Results are interpreted and discussed, along with limitations and future directions.