The Interdisciplinarity of Habitability

A case study in improving student outcomes

Bio

Dr David Brown is a research staff member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics group within the Physics Department, and in the 2024/25 academic year was a senior research fellow. He leads the Science Management Office for the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, which is designed to search for planets like Earth in the habitable zones of stars like the Sun.

 

David’s full bio can be found on his Warwick webpage.

Case study summary

For his case study David developed the IATL postgraduate module which he convenes, “Habitability in the Universe” (IL907), to better enable students’ synthesis of disciplinary ideas and concepts into an interdisciplinary picture of habitability.

The concept of integration or synthesis is often considered a key component of interdisciplinarity, but David felt that the module did not reflect this and instead provided a series of ‘taster’ sessions covering different disciplinary perspectives on habitability. Moreover, he was concerned that the module’s design did not adequately facilitate students’ efforts to integrate the different topics covered in class and was thus not enabling their exploration of the overarching subject.

As a starting point, David analysed two years of detailed assignment marks to investigate how students’ scores for the ‘interdisciplinarity’ component of the module’s assignments compared to those for other components. He found that at cohort-level there was no conclusive evidence of lower marks for ‘interdisciplinarity’, but that when individual students found this aspect of the module more difficult, they tended to do so significantly.

Concluding that there was therefore room to improve the module’s approach to integrative interdisciplinarity, David designed and implemented a multi-part update. This consisted of:

a) reworking the introductory session to include reflection on students’ disciplinary perspectives of habitability,

b) adding short segments throughout the module focused on discussion of connections between the topics covered, and

c) creating a new end-of-module session that builds on the previous activities to revisit the students’ initial ideas, encouraging revision of these through synthesis and integration of the various disciplinary view and concepts covered in the module.

By modifying “Habitability in the Universe” in this way, David has introduced an explicitly integrative element to the module. The new sessions introduce integration step-by-step, encouraging and enabling students in interdisciplinary exploration.