There has been a growing emphasis on the education of future generations of engineers who will have to tackle complex, global issues that are sociotechnical in nature. The National Science Foundation invests millions of dollars in interdisciplinary engineering education research (EER) to create an innovative and inclusive culture aimed at radical…

In this dissertation, I study those research practices and values which limit trans-disciplinarity among academics of science teaching & learning. I consider trans-disciplinarity an ethically imbued practice that enables thinking about the productivity of our research practices and makes possible flows of connectivity in the generation of our…

Second language (L2) writing teaching and research in China have enjoyed a rich history and have had remarkable achievements. However, the extensive L2 writing literature created in China has not yet been analyzed comprehensively from theoretical, methodological, and philosophical perspectives. This research synthesis provides a metadisciplinary…

Translational research (TR) is the process of bringing innovations from basic science into applied science, usually referring to the practice of medicine. It has been assumed that cross-disciplinary collaboration, or interdisciplinarity research (IDR), is essential to translation. Yet there is a gap in the literature regarding the interaction…

This dissertation draws on data from a quarter-long case study implementing a number of social science and humanities research methods. This study was conducted at the University of Washington in two sections of First-Year Composition and investigates the boundary-marking interactions that occur in a writing class by tracing the experiences of…

Scientific results are communicated visually in the literature through diagrams, visualizations, and photographs. In this thesis, we developed a figure processing pipeline to classify more than 8 million figures from PubMed Central into different figure types and study the resulting patterns of visual information as they relate to scholarly…

This research investigates how data on multidisciplinary collaborative experiences can be used to solve a novel problem: recommending research profiles of potential collaborators to academic researchers seeking to engage in multidisciplinary research collaboration. As the current domain theories of multidisciplinary collaboration are insufficient…

This ethnographic study answers calls for research into the ways that virtual organizations (or innovation-driven collaborative teams) form and develop, what supports and constraints their development, and the leadership models that support the organizations' work. The study examines how a virtual organization emerged from an intersegmental…

In this dissertation, I use qualitative research methods to study relationships between compositionists and faculty in other disciplines in the context of cross-curricular literacy (CCL) work. Drawing on a two-year CCL project in the biology department, for which I was a participant observer, I argue that compositionists need to attend more…

Four identifiable disciplinary goals can be discerned from the development of political science as a discipline. These goals indicate that political science students will (1) attain knowledge about political systems (national and international); (2) gain an understanding of how politics works; (3) develop critical thinking skills; and, (4) learn…

The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two…

An abundance of academic research has focused on identifying, explicating, operationalizing, and analyzing variables used to understand the dynamics of customer service. Despite this scholarly attention, applied researchers and the popular press have long reported consumers' dissatisfaction with the service received during their customer…

Schools are complex institutions in which change occurs almost constantly. As each new piece of information is learned, the learner is changed, never to return to the same state they were prior to the act of learning, (Morrison, 2002). This study investigates the impact of interdisciplinary lesson study on teachers' instructional decisions and…