Epistemic games reveal unacknowledged disciplinary differences in interdisciplinary teams¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r3 · q2 · n=18 students across 4 graduate teams (3-5 students each), projects lasting 5-13 weeks, two Australian graduate interdisciplinary courses
Currency · newest study 2024 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Interdisciplinary student teams constructing a shared problem statement used five recurring, profoundly multimodal (not purely verbal) interaction moves — knowledge sharing, perspective-taking, simulation, knowledge validation, and negotiation — and these moves regularly surfaced disciplinary differences in what counts as trustworthy evidence and how quickly a problem framing should be treated as settled, but these differences were rarely explicitly discussed as disciplinary in origin.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Systematic coding of over 90 hours of video (12.1 hours selected for detailed analysis) across four interdisciplinary graduate teams identified the same five recurring moves in every team, across different problem domains and team compositions, indicating the moves function as general-purpose strategies rather than being specific to one problem or team composition. → Arthars et al. 2024

q2 i? All four teams showed disciplinary-aligned differences in (a) when a problem statement should be considered finalized versus still open to revision (design/business students tolerating more ongoing revision; IT/science students treating revision as "back to the drawing board"), and (b) what counts as trustworthy evidence (business students favoring industry reports; design/IT students favoring direct empirical observation or personal replication) — and these differences were "often left unnoticed by the students, resulting in unproductive tensions." → Arthars et al. 2024

q2 i? Non-speaking team members were shown, through gesture, gaze, body positioning, and short verbal acknowledgments ("mmm," "yeah," head nods), to be actively participating in the shared-understanding game rather than passively observing — supporting the paper's argument that these moves cannot be adequately analyzed through language/discourse alone. → Arthars et al. 2024

Evidence¶

Arthars et al. 2024¶

Arthars, N., Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2024). Constructing shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems: Epistemic games in interdisciplinary teamwork. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(2), 405-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2341390

q2-q3 · naturalistic video-based interaction analysis (Multimodal Interaction Analysis + Jeffersonian transcription) with a systematic multi-step coding process (entry conditions, epistemic goal, target form, constraints, moves, transfers, exit conditions) adapted from prior published methodology, multi-coder verification; no experimental manipulation or comparison condition · i? · the abstract prints no effect size; the full text may · n=18 students across 4 graduate teams (3-5 students each), projects lasting 5-13 weeks, two Australian graduate interdisciplinary courses · qualitative · r3

Four interdisciplinary graduate teams (mixing business, design, science, and IT backgrounds) were video-recorded across 5-13 week projects. Analysis identified the same five epistemic-game moves — knowledge sharing, perspective-taking, simulation, knowledge validation, negotiation — in all four teams despite different problems (e.g., a fintech-trust problem, a reinsurance problem). The knowledge-validation move most often exposed disciplinary-aligned differences in evidentiary standards, and how quickly a problem statement should be treated as settled also varied by discipline. The authors document that these differences, while visible in the recordings, were rarely made explicit or discussed as disciplinary in origin by the students themselves. Detailed transcript analysis also showed non-speaking members actively participating through gesture and short vocalizations, supporting the paper's argument for treating these moves as inherently multimodal.

Discussion¶

This is methodologically careful naturalistic research (q2-q3: peer-reviewed, systematic multi-step coding framework applied consistently, verified across all four teams) but remains observational — the authors explicitly note the design "does not allow us to make definite causal inferences" about how specific disciplinary backgrounds affected participation. The illustrative detail is drawn primarily from one team (the "Trust" team of three students) with confirmation that the same patterns recurred across the other three teams, rather than equally detailed transcripts for all four. The main practical implication — that disciplinary differences in evidentiary standards are common but usually invisible to the team itself — is well-supported descriptively, though the paper does not test whether explicitly naming these differences (an intervention) would actually improve team outcomes.

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