written by K. K. Mashood, Vashti Sawtelle, Charles W. Anderson, Rebecca L. Matz, Emily E. Scott, and Sonia M. Underwood

Interdisciplinary thinking and reconciliation is integral to developing a coherent understanding of science. Projects like NEXUS are significant advancements in this regard and have created a need for new assessment tools. This paper discusses the development of an empirically grounded framework to assess the interdisciplinarity of students' explanations of everyday phenomena. As a preliminary analysis, we examine interview transcripts from two undergraduate students explaining the solidification of liquid egg white upon boiling. The extent to which students invoke different disciplines is considered as a criterion to assess the interdisciplinarity of their explanations. We carry this out by mapping the vocabulary and knowledge elements involved in student explanations to content presentations in introductory level physics, chemistry and biology textbooks.

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