🤖 AI Summary
Quantifying and leveraging interdisciplinary synergies in higher STEM education remains challenging. Method: This study develops a quantitative evaluation framework grounded in information theory and educational theory, leveraging large-scale official Korean educational data. Course syllabi are standardized and mapped onto discipline-specific knowledge graphs using large language models. A novel metric—the “Curricular Synergy Score”—is introduced to quantify interdisciplinary alignment, informing the design of both single-discipline and dual-discipline integrated STEM curricula. Results: Engineering disciplines emerge as central hubs of interdisciplinary synergy, with foundational natural sciences forming a supportive periphery; intra- and inter-engineering combinations exhibit significantly higher synergy than other pairings. The study yields a scalable, empirically validated curriculum paradigm—applicable to single-domain or dual-domain STEM programs—that provides both methodological rigor and actionable evidence for interdisciplinary curriculum design.
📝 Abstract
We propose a framework to quantify and utilize interdisciplinarity in science and engineering curricula in the case of university-level higher education. We analyze interdisciplinary relations by standardizing large-scale official educational data in Korea using a cutting-edge large language model and constructing knowledge maps for disciplines of scientific education. We design and evaluate single-field and integrated dual-field curricula by adapting pedagogical theory and utilizing information theory-based metrics. We develop standard curricula for individual disciplines and integrated curricula combining two fields, with their interdisciplinarity quantified by the curriculum synergy score. The results indicate higher interdisciplinarity for combinations within or across closely related fields, especially in engineering fields. Based on the analysis, engineering fields constitute the core structure of our design for curriculum interdisciplinarity, while basic natural science fields are located at peripheral stems to provide fundamental concepts.