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In many sectors and in many respects, interdisciplinarity has made progress in recent decades, but less so when it comes to evaluating interdisciplinary work. Challenges remain, especially regarding what counts as 'good' interdisciplinarity. While previous reviews describe broad trends contributing to these challenges, high-level observations are less suited to: (1) pinpointing underlying sources of persistent evaluative issues, (2) capturing less frequent counterexamples and emerging trends, and (3) providing practical guidance for moving the field forward. This article presents a novel approach for excavating and analyzing assessment designs within and across a wide range of published studies. It is the first study to structure its review of interdisciplinary evaluation around the basics of evaluation theory, creating a simplified model of assessment design choices called an "assessment pathway." It further stands alone as an extensive systematic review of the interdisciplinary literature uniquely placed within the context of evaluation, encompassing 20 years, 142 studies, 1,006 assessment pathways, and 19,114 data points. Results show that while interdisciplinary assessments to date excel at variation, only 12% of identified pathways contain the minimum elements required to reach an evaluative judgment. Increased attention to evaluation theory can catalyze progress and provide structure and shared language to a highly varied domain. Readers can visually explore the full dataset online and download it from Harvard's Dataverse.

Integration is crucial to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work and it therefore deserves perennial attention by scholars and practitioners of such work. Few have thought so carefully, deeply, and tenaciously about integration as Julie Thompson Klein. In this article, we recount the development of Klein's thinking on integration, from her early stepwise model in 1990 to her current socio-linguistic model. After summarizing Klein's views, we compare the socio-linguistic model to a more recent view of integration known as the IPO (input-process-output) model. We show how these two models of integration relate to one another, and then we demonstrate their complementarity using an example of integrative argumentation from a Toolbox workshop. We conclude that we can understand instances of cross-disciplinary integration better with both models than with only one or the other. This theoretical stereoscope opens new avenues of research about the types of integrative relations collaborators use, what is involved in social/rhetorical integration, and the extent to which it is feasible to specify all of the parameters in an instance of integration.

This article aims to convince readers of the value of intersecting the scholarship of interdisciplinarity with the field of argumentation studies. The interdisciplinarity literature has not much engaged with the vehicle that carries interdisciplinary learning, languages, and locutions: the argument. On the argumentation studies side, despite the diverse interests of these scholars, not many have studied how reasoning proceeds in interdisciplinary inquiries. To aid bridge-building from both sides, I use the example of interdisciplinary abductive reasoning to show how the two fields can benefit from each other. The article proceeds as thin, comparative case studies thickened by theory. By analyzing two extended cases of inquiry cast in Douglas Walton's argumentation terms, I argue Walton's model is necessary but not sufficient for understanding and dealing with the unique challenges of interdisciplinary abduction. I propose, instead, we add the PEPR model (Pattern Recognition, Explanation Imagination, Pattern Matching, and Reporting) to help us focus on the data to be explained while we lean on Walton's model to understand the people doing the explaining. I conclude argumentation studies and interdisciplinary theory can be mutually enlightening.

Monitoring and evaluating interdisciplinarity is crucial for informing decisions about interdisciplinary (ID) policies, funding, and work. Yet, the recent explosion of ID assessment approaches represents an overwhelming buffet of options that has produced little consensus, limited guidance, and minimal insights into interdisciplinarity and its value to society. This article extends findings from a companion study that systematically reviewed the ID assessment field from 2000 to 2019. Engaging with the same extensive dataset but in a new way, we employ typological analysis and condense 1,006 published assessment designs into just five main assessment approaches called Pathway Profiles. We then tailor assessment guidance to each Pathway Profile, including potential settings in which each could be most useful and ways each could be modified to reduce challenges and increase rigor. Our goal in defining and interacting with the core of the ID assessment field in this way is not only to clarify activity in this vast and disjointed space but also to simplify and facilitate processes of understanding, choosing from, and strategically developing this diverse landscape. Pathway Profiles can be used as heuristic gateways to the ID assessment field, particularly when it comes to finding relevant examples, adapting designs to situations, and ultimately uncovering the true outcomes of interdisciplinarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim/Purpose Collaborative, interdisciplinary research is growing rapidly, but we still have limited and fragmented understanding of what is arguably the heart of such research-collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning (CIR). Background This article integrates neo-Pragmatist theories of reasoning with insights from literature on interdisciplinary research to develop a working definition of collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning. The article then applies this definition to an empirical example to demonstrate its utility. Methodology The empirical example is an excerpt from a Toolbox workshop transcript. The article reconstructs a cogent, inductive, interdisciplinary argument from the excerpt to show how CIR can proceed in an actual team. Contribution The study contributes operational definitions of 'reasoning together' and 'collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning' to existing literature. It also demonstrates empirical methods for operationalizing these definitions, with the argument reconstruction providing a brief case study in how teams reason together. Findings 1. Collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning is the attempted integration of disciplinary contributions to exchange, evaluate, and assert claims that enable shared understanding and eventually action in a local context. 2. Pragma-dialectic argument reconstruction with conversation analysis is a method for observing such reasoning from a transcript. 3. The example team developed a strong inductive argument to integrate their disciplinary contributions about modeling. Recommendations for Practitioners 1. Interdisciplinary work requires agreeing with teammates about what is assertible and why. 2. To assert something together legitimately requires making a cogent, integrated argument. Recommendation for Researchers 1. An argument is the basic unit of analysis for interdisciplinary integration. 2. To assess the argument's cogency, it is helpful to reconstruct it using pragma-dialectic principles and conversation analysis tools. 3. To assess the argument's interdisciplinary integration and participant roles in the integration, it is helpful to graph the flow of words as a Sankey chart from participant-disciplines to the argument conclusion. Future Research How does this definition of CIR relate to other interdisciplinary 'cognition' or 'learning' type theories? How can practitioners and theorists tell the difference between true intersubjectivity and superficial agreeableness in these dialogues? What makes an instance of CIR 'good' or 'bad'? How does collaborative, transdisciplinary reasoning differ from CIR, if at all? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]