Designing Tasks for Interdisciplinary Physics Reasoning

Interdisciplinary Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) has become increasingly important, at institutions such as the University of Detroit Mercy which is highly populated with undergraduate pre-health and life-science majors. Students may be expected to apply physics concepts with biological or medical context, making it a good setting for the development and implementation of interdisciplinary studies. However, students lack support creating these connections in classroom settings, especially if the concepts appear contradictory. This highlights the need for educational approaches that tackle this challenge and support Interdisciplinary Reconciliation (IDR). In this project we aim to bridge this gap by designing tasks that build the students' understanding of interdisciplinary concepts. Specifically, we developed a set of questions that are focused on biologically or chemically relevant ideas, including cancer, and chemical bonds in order to study how students reason through physics concepts like fluid pressure, stress and bond energy. This methodology was adapted from prior work on task design as well as student reasoning (Gouvea et al. 2012). Using this framework, we designed four tasks to support IDR where students can integrate and make sense of physics beyond a single discipline. This poster presents our task design and examples of developed questions as well as planned methods to collect student feedback through think-aloud interviews. We discuss next steps we plan to take to refine these tasks based on student responses and feedback from the broader Physics Education Research community to improve IDR in IPLS courses.