Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Skills and Dispositions in Professional Programs

Reports from employers and employees consistently stress the importance of “soft skills,” (also called 21st century skills or professional skills), such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ report Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work and several reports discussed in a Forbes article indicating that “84% of employees and managers believe new employees must possess soft skills and demonstrate them in the hiring process.” Common skills listed relate to communication, teamwork, collaboration, and life-long learning. There are plenty of articles – both in scholarly journals and popular press – that list and describe some of these skills – for example, ForbesAdviser’s 11 Essential Soft Skills in 2024.

But what are these “soft skills” really, and how do you foster them within formal education or on-the-job training and experiences?

A Competency-Based Approach: Cross-Disciplinary Skills and Dispositions

From the perspective of Competency Based Education, there are three types of competencies: Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions (otherwise known as attitudes, beliefs, and values). Skills may be divided into disciplinary skills (unique to each field) and cross-disciplinary skills used across disciplines (e.g., written and verbal communication). Dispositions are typically cross-disciplinary (e.g., adaptability, perseverance, and lifelong-learning mindset).

For a long time, courses in professional degree programs have focused primarily on discipline-specific knowledge and skills (for example, a computer science program may focus on applying programming-related concepts to create software, while an instructional design program may focus on concepts from educational psychology as well as practical instructional design skills). Many faculty and administrators assumed that cross-disciplinary skills were well covered in “gen ed” courses. Dispositions were rarely explicitly discussed in discipline-specific coursework.

However, we know from educational psychology that it is difficult for learners to transfer learning to different contexts (from one assignment or course to another, or from school to a professional context). Therefore, many scholars suggest that competencies such as cross-disciplinary skills should not be fostered and practiced only in a single gen-ed course – they should be applied within professional courses and in assignments or activities that align with the types of experiences professionals face. It has also been shown that dispositions develop over time, meaning that dispositions should be taught or fostered throughout a program.

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Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Skills

Cross-disciplinary skills can be fostered within disciplinary coursework in many ways, including authentic learning approaches, team projects, experiential learning, engaging with case studies, and instructor modeling. Students should be given multiple opportunities for practice and feedback; giving, receiving, and appropriately applying constructive feedback are both cross-disciplinary skills frequently required at the workplace that may be fostered by scaffolding such peer feedback exercises.

Integration into disciplinary coursework provides the opportunity to tie these opportunities to practice in realistic, discipline-specific contexts. For example, a communication-related skill is to “tailor the message to the audience.” While the “audience” for academic papers is usually the instructor, assignments can be created that require students to write a memo or make a brief presentation aimed at a technical colleague, manager, or client. This requires students to think about what the intended audience may or may not know about their technical discipline, what motivates them, and how formal the communication should be.

Cross-disciplinary skills can be assessed in several ways, such as:

• Observing a student applying the skill, using an observation checklist
• Review artifacts, such as project reports, presentation recordings, papers, or photographs of an event, and reports accompanying an assignment such as logs, reflections, and rationale for decisions made.
• Peer-review of artifacts, self-assessments, and self-and-peer review of team members’ interactions.
• The application of cross-disciplinary skills can be tracked across an individual course or across an entire program through the use of a portfolio, including reflections about each project, which skills were activated, and what they have learned, as well as project artifacts.

We recommend that cross-disciplinary skills be taught and assessed multiple times across a program. In early courses, a high amount of instructor scaffolding may be needed (e.g., in the form of worksheets, rubrics, and demonstrations of solving a similar problem). As the student progresses across the program, you may “fade out” the scaffolding (allowing them to take more initiative) as problems faced become more complex and authentic.

Fostering Dispositions

While some professional programs (such as teacher education and nursing) already explicitly teach and assess dispositions, many other academic programs do not.

Many people believe that dispositions (e.g. perseverance) are something you are born with – remember the Stanford marshmallow experiment? You might wonder whether being perseverant or being empathetic can really be taught. You might also wonder whether they can really be assessed (a reason faculty are often weary to try to teach them), or whether they can or should be incorporated into professional courses.

Some things we know about dispositions are:

• Educational research has shown that dispositions are malleable, but not agile. That is, they develop over time, but can take a lot of effort to learn (or unlearn!) Therefore, you cannot foster them within a single activity or even a single course.
• Dispositions activate applicable knowledge and skills at the right time. If a student is disposed to “value collaboration”, their teamwork skills will be activated when there is a need to collaborate with others, while those who do not value collaboration might fall back to a divide-and-conquer strategy that may lead to a disjoined paper or project.
• Dispositions cannot be directly assessed. They are indirectly measured through actions, behaviors, and articulation of reflection.
• Instructors may believe that they already model these dispositions. For example, a professor may believe they are modelling adaptability or perseverance whenever they do a demonstration for the class, but students may not realize this. Therefore, it is important to make dispositions explicit in coursework.

Dispositions can be fostered within disciplinary coursework in many ways, including:

• Drawing attention to the disposition
• Modeling through communicating one’s thought process when the disposition is activated.
• Communication with professionals about the importance of the disposition and how it is activated in their job (this may be especially effective with a guest visit or video)
• Using case studies that highlight the impact of the presence or absence of a disposition
• Facilitating whole class and small group discussions about the disposition
• Requiring or encouraging student reflection on their own development of the disposition
• Enculturation of the disposition by instructors, students, and senior peers

Dispositions can be assessed indirectly in a number of ways, such as:

• Self-evaluation of the students’ development of a disposition
• Evaluation of reflection statements (a rubric can be used)
• Oral assessment through interviewing students
• Observing students as they demonstrate a task and communicate their thought process
• Use of a portfolio that includes their description of the disposition along with a discussion of when and why it is used in personal, educational, or professional experiences (such as internships). This could be accompanied with artifacts, such as descriptions of projects/tasks, related documentation or final products, and a reflection on why the disposition was applicable and how it enabled the use of related knowledge and skills

As is the case with cross-disciplinary skills, dispositions should be fostered throughout a program by incorporating them into multiple courses, fading scaffolding and increasing the authenticity and complexity of assignments, projects, and activities over time.

Implications for Instructional Designers

As described above, there are many ways for instructors to teach or foster cross-disciplinary skills and dispositions in their courses. How can instructional designers promote fostering dispositions in professional programs and courses they work with?

First, examine whether cross-disciplinary skills or dispositions are already explicitly or implicitly included in the course. If not, suggest beginning with picking just one cross-disciplinary skill or competency to start with, then growing the coverage over time – ideally, by adjusting what is already included in the course, rather than adding workload for students and instructors.

Then, discuss ways to meaningfully incorporate cross-disciplinary skills and dispositions into the course. Help with the design or selection of videos, rubrics, interactive case studies, etc. Help through how assignments, projects, and assessments might engage students and prepare them to transfer their learning to future work contexts by incorporating the cross-disciplinary skills and dispositions into tasks similar to those that would be performed by professionals in this field.

If you’d like to learn more about cross-disciplinary skills and dispositions, an online Master’s in Learning Design and Technology from Purdue University is a great place to start.

Source: Marisa Exter, Associate Professor