Research On Current Situation And Promotion Countermeasures Of Interdisciplinary Competence Of Engineering Students In The Context Of STEAM Education

With the continuous advancement of social informatization,economic globalization and world diversification,and human deeply understanding of sustainable development,ecological protection,and engineering ethics,increasingly complex modern engineering demands interdisciplinary solution,which requires future engineers not only to have solid professional knowledge,but also the ability to integrate knowledge from different disciplines and be proficient in applying the skills of different professional fields.Therefore,Engineering education oriented to the cultivation of future engineers must focus on fostering the interdisciplinary competence of engineering students.Interdisciplinary competence means that engineering students integrate the knowledge,methods,and perspectives of STEAM disciplines to produce higher-level and more comprehensive cognition to explain engineering phenomena,solve engineering problems,or generate new engineering products in ways that are impossible with a single discipline.Cultivating the interdisciplinary competence of engineering students needs to break the disciplinary barriers,integrate the education content of different disciplines,carefully design the teaching process,strengthen the students’ understanding of the knowledge of different disciplines,make their knowledge structure more reasonable,analyzing engineering problems more comprehensively,and interdisciplinary competence improved.In order to achieve this educational goal,STEAM education emerged at the historic moment.Different from the traditional sub-discipline education,STEAM education organically integrates science,technology,art,and mathematics with engineering disciplines.At present,it has been elevated to a national strategic level by many western countries,and After more than ten years of development of STEAM education,there are many valuable experiences that can be used for reference in our engineering education reform.In contrast,it is still in infancy to cultivate engineering students’ interdisciplinary competence in china,and the actual situation is not that satisfactory:The so-called interdisciplinary education offered by most universities only provides a small number of simultaneous courses,and there is no guidance given by tutors to students for any course selection.Students’ learning results are not good,and interdisciplinary abilities are difficult to be cultivated and developed.It can be seen that the reform of engineering education in China must have a sense of urgency and respond to the situation.More comprehensive,specific and feasible considerations must be made in the curriculum setting and teaching methods to effectively improve the interdisciplinary competence of engineering students.With such a realistic problem,the author consulted a large number of relevant literature at home and abroad,and found that research on interdisciplinary competence has achieved certain research results.Some Foreign scholars have developed a "interdisciplinary competence" scale by deconstructing interdisciplinary competence.Although,many domestic scholars believe that the interdisciplinary competence of Chinese college students needs to be developed urgently and explore the corresponding training strategies,most of the studies are case studies,comparative studies,or experience summaries,which cannot provide us with an overall picture of the field.In addition,Chen Yaling(2015)pointed out that China’s current education system with disciplines as the basic unit has become the biggest obstacle to the development of interdisciplinary engineering education and the cultivation of engineering students’ interdisciplinary ability.There is no persuasive systematic analysis and lack of authoritative scales to support students’ development of interdisciplinary competence.These problems need to be clarified.To this end,this paper is based on foreign maturity scales,and the author has perfected the specific measurement items of the scales by extensively reading relevant literature and combining with the actuality of engineering education in China.Then adopting a combination of online survey and offline survey,512 questionnaires retrieved,494 valid questionnaires,and effective rate is 96.5%.The collected data was then imported into statistical analysis software SPSS 22.0,and the status of interdisciplinary competence of engineering students was specifically analyzed from three dimensions: interdisciplinary skills,reflective behavior,and recognizing disciplinary perspectives,besides,relevant factors affecting the interdisciplinary competence of engineering students have also been identified.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)On the whole,the interdisciplinary competence of engineering students in China is not that good.A large part of the student group is at a relatively low level.The order of interdisciplinary skills from high to low is as follows: mathematics interdisciplinary skills > technical interdisciplinary technology > scientific interdisciplinary skills > art interdisciplinary skills.In the two dimensions of reflective behavior and disciplinary cognition,more than two-thirds of engineering student groups are at the middle-low level.(2)The level of interdisciplinary competence of female engineering students is higher than the level of interdisciplinary competence of male engineering students;as the grade of engineering students increases,the level of interdisciplinary competence also gradually increases;the level of interdisciplinary competence basically shows a trend of better performance as the college entrance examination results increase;the interdisciplinary competence level of engineering students in university of 985 project and university of 211 project is significantly higher than the interdisciplinary competence level of engineering students in ordinary universities.(3)Teachers ’practice of interdisciplinary education and problem-based teaching have positive predictive effects on the interdisciplinary competence of engineering students,that is,the importance teachers attach to interdisciplinary education and interdisciplinary teaching has a positive impact on the formation of students’ interdisciplinary competence.Based on the above research conclusions,this paper believes that improving the interdisciplinary competence level of engineering students should start from the following four aspects: create an interdisciplinary engineering curriculum group that integrates STEAM;give full play to the important role of graduation design in improving engineering students’ interdisciplinary competence;adopt a teaching model oriented to real engineering problems;increase the enthusiasm of teachers to participate in interdisciplinary education practice.