UTILIZING SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS TO VISUALIZE STUDENT INTERACTIONS IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY COURSE-BASED UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH EXPERIENCES

Today’s science leaders are consistently faced with issues such as climate change and availability of clean water that require interdisciplinary teams to address the challenges. However, most undergraduate curricula are siloed into single disciplines, limiting student exposure to other disciplinary perspectives. Three multidisciplinary course-based undergraduate research experiences (MD-CUREs) were simultaneously developed that encourage students in upper-level hydrogeology, environmental engineering, and microbiology courses to share data and information to address a combined research question pertaining to the health of the watershed where their research site was located. Students were specifically trained in team science techniques and instructed on the importance of creating multidisciplinary teams in their work.

Students (n=39) were issued a pre- and post-survey addressing interactions within the MD-CUREs. Social network analysis (SNA) was utilized to visualize these interactions and assess the network density and faction formation across disciplines within the MD-CURE. Results suggest that though students did not exhibit significant levels of multidisciplinary communication via social media and/or phone in the semester, they did learn from and develop trust relationships across disciplines. This suggests that though students may have had limited interactions with teams in other disciplines, they valued the sharing of data and information that took place in the MD-CUREs.

Methodological decisions made while implementing SNA into this geoscience education study will be shared as well as suggestions of ways to acknowledge the multidisciplinary nature of science in geoscience courses.