| Since the mid-21st century,“interdisciplinary”has become a major era characteristic of contemporary scientific development.On the one hand,when major contemporary technological,economic and social problems are highly comprehensive and interdisciplinary,various subjects should coordinate with each other,thus ushering the modern society into a systematic,synthetic and integrated period.On the other hand,subjects,on the basis of high differentiation,are heading towards integration.The mutual penetration and interaction among natural sciences,human and social sciences,engineering and technological sciences and so on have become an increasingly prominent phenomenon,which has thereby blurred the boundary of different subjects.The work report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China points out that innovation constitutes the primary driving force of development.Without interdisciplinary development,one after another innovation and breakthrough of modern science research would be impossible.Under the background,there has been a worldwide consensus on the importance of interdisciplinary research and education.Meanwhile,reform and further development of interdisciplinary research and education have been an irresistible trend.Research universities are main places to bring up innovative and interdisciplinary talents,so they should enhance the intensity of reform and innovation and build a more tolerant,open and free talent model by summing up defects of the traditional single subject development model over the past 40 years since China's adoption of the reform and opening-up policy.All in all,that research universities study the interdisciplinary education model not only coincides with the internal rule of knowledge integration and the talent requirement of social development,but also has a close bearing on the development path of universities and even influence whether individual needs of graduates for all-around development can be satisfied.In this paper,research theories,such as the theory of knowledge production model reform,theory of ecological system,theory of educational ecological system and organization theory,are combined,and research methods,such as the literature review,theory deduction,case study,content analysis,questionnaire analysis,and data analysis,are employed to achieve an in-depth and systematic discussion of the issue of"interdisciplinary education model in research universities" The purpose of this research is to clarify factors of graduates' interdisciplinary education model and deeply examine the mutual relationship and operation rule among various factors,thus systematically building a graduate interdisciplinary education model for research universities.Moreover,in view of China's practical national conditions,suggestions are made to promote interdisciplinary development of graduates in research universities.To be specific,this research is conducted,revolving around the following three research questions:(1)What are characteristics and basic constitution of research universities'interdisciplinary education model from the theoretical perspective of knowledge production model reform and ecological system?(Analysis framework)(2)What are factors of research universities' interdisciplinary education model and how about their importance?(Factor extraction and concept model)(3)How should research universities' graduate interdisciplinary education model be systematically built and operated?(Model construction and operation)Through theoretical discussion and empirical research,this research comes up with the following research conclusions:First,research universities' interdisciplinary education model is a multi-structural,complex and open concept.In this paper,relevant concepts of“subject”and“interdisciplinary”are clarified;causes and classification of "interdisciplinary" are summarized;model research as a method to analyze objective things is introduced.All this is of vital theoretical significance to guide graduates' interdisciplinary education model and helps sum up classified study of domestic scholars on the interdisciplinary education model.Following that,through theoretical analysis of knowledge production model reform,the influence of the knowledge production model reform on subjects and graduates' development model is examined.On that basis,characteristics of graduates'development model under the background of knowledge production model reform are discussed from the aspect of graduates' development objective,process and evaluation at an attempt to provide theoretical guidance for in-depth interpretation of factors in the interdisciplinary education model.The focus of this paper is on expounding the theoretical bases of the whole research,including the ecological system and educational ecological system theories.The nonlinear thinking model,systematic viewpoints and integrated ideas of theories related to ecological systems can provide a scientific basis and framework for exploration of channels to address complex social crises.It is apt to regard graduates' interdisciplinary educaiton as an ecological system with integrity,hierarchical structure,dynamic stability and cooperativity as their major characteristics.Moreover,graduates' interdisciplinary education model can be defined as an open system whose internal factors are combined in certain structure and interact with the external environment.At the same time,by referring to existing research of organization theories and combining ecological system theories,the systematic constitution of graduates' interdisciplinary education model is proposed,which should include both the internal structural system and the external environmental system.The internal structural system can be subdivided into the development objective subsystem,organizational structure subsystem,development process subsystem,institution and standard subsystem,conditional resources subsystem.According to different research objectives,the research objects involved in this research have different focuses.For example,study on research universities' graduate interdisciplinary education model is mainly conducted within research universities.On the contrary,study on operation of the model is conducted against the background of research universities and their external environmental system.Second,research universities' graduate interdisciplinary education model is built with five factor subsystems,including the development objective,organizational structure,development process,institution and standard,and conditional resources.There are seven common factors and 24 subsidiary factors under the seven common factors.Evaluation of various common factors' relative importance can provide basis for focuses of model construction and operation.By taking a close look at the best practice of six research universities' graduate interdisciplinary education at home and abroad,this paper succeeds in building a structural analysis framework.These six renowned research universities include Harvard University,Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge University,Tsinghua University,Peking University and Zhejiang University.Their graduate interdisciplinary degree programs are comparatively studied to sum up referable experiences.Though the six cases each have their own characteristics,involve different interdisciplinary fields and differ from each other in terms of interdisciplinary organizational forms,they are all targeted at interdisciplinary development and emphasize on the interdisciplinary development objective oriented towards social demands,integration of development processes,complete campus institutional management,resource integration and sharing,and cooperation with different walks of life.Based on the above case study,the content analysis method is adopted to encode textual materials of the above cases to further extract factors constructing graduates' interdisciplinary education model,which mainly includes the interdisciplinary knowledge structure,interdisciplinary courses,interdisciplinary team lecturing,special funds for interdisciplinary talent development,etc.These factors fully demonstrate“interdisciplinary orientation,”"heterogeneity and diversity,",and“applied context”of the knowledge production model II.Besides,through multi-case comparison and analysis,this paper further digs mutual correlations among different factors.Every factor is not an independently existing individual.Model operation is an outcome of multifactor interaction and mutual restriction.This further reveals integrity,systematicity,and other ecological system characteristics of graduates'interdisciplinary education model.Third,combining construction outcomes of factors and frameworks in the part of literature review and case study,and using peer discussion,this paper compares,confirms and supplements some factors and their connotations.On that basis,the conceptual model is built.In light of the conceptual model,descriptive statistics are conducted of data acquired through 308 copies of questionnaires.According to the average scores of different factors'importance,the conditional resource module,development objective model and institution and standard model are found to score the highest among the eight most important factors.Next,the initial conceptual model is verified and improved using reliability test,factor analysis and regression analysis.Results show that the 24 factors proposed by this paper all pass the empirical verification.Additionally,seven common factors,including the development objective common factor oriented towards demands and abilities,diverse organizational structure common factor,comprehensive course teaching common factor,flexible tutors' team common factor,experiential scientific research project common factor,overall-planned and coordinated institution and standard common factor,and conditional resource sharing and integration common factor,are extracted from the 24 factors and defined,respectively.After that,via factor analysis and clustering of all factors and ranking of the factors' importance average,it is found that institution and standard,development objective and conditional resource are relatively important to graduates'interdisciplinary development.However,organizational structure is the least important in the interdisciplinary development.Meanwhile,the multiple regression analysis is employed to verify a high fitting degree of the model chosen in this paper,and the independent variables extracted can well explain dependent variables.Fourth,construction and operation of research universities' graduate interdisciplinary education model are studied.To construct such a model should stick to four basic principles,including objective orientation,organicity and internal correlation,cooperativity,and integrity.The model's integrated framework formed under the guidance of the above four principles is made up of five subsystems,including the development objective subsystem oriented towards demands and abilities,diverse organizational structure subsystem,integrated development process subsystem,overall-planned and coordinated institution and standard subsystem,and conditional resource sharing and integration subsystem.Under each subsystem are specific elements.In the meantime,ecological system theory attaches great importance to integrated correlation and organic integration of various elements.Therefore,the complementariness of the five subsystems as well as the relationship between research graduate interdisciplinary development system and external environmental system is further exposed.Last but not the least,the operation rule and internal mechanism of graduates' interdisciplinary education model are uncovered on the basis of the above integrated model framework.Graduates' interdisciplinary development is not just an objective reflection of knowledge and subject advances.With interdisciplinary as the logic starting point and oriented towards problems or research,graduates'interdisciplinary development upgrades from the organizational coordination of knowledge and resources to the relationship coordination of institutions and interest groups to serve the national economic and social development.Against the backdrop,the operation logic of graduates' interdisciplinary education model is elucidated from three aspects,namely the balance between problem orientation and academic orientation,coordinated adjustment of knowledge production relationships and coordinated distribution of development elements,interaction between the top-down support and restriction(exogenous driving force)at the national and social level and the down-top feedback and influence(endogenous driving force)of research universities and tutors,respectively.Fifthly,based on the above empirical analysis and the theoretical model for graduate interdisciplinary development,and combining China's national conditions,suggestions for further improvement of research universities,interdisciplinary research graduates' training model are put forward from the perspective of policy support,resource guarantee,organizational management,development activities,and so on.To sum up,contributions of this research are mainly reflected as below:(1)In terms of research perspectives,this paper combines theoretical perspectives of knowledge production model reform theory,ecological system theory,and educational ecological system theory to deeply examine research universities'graduate interdisciplinary education model and tentatively propose a theoretical analysis framework for graduates'interdisciplinary education model;(2)In terms of research methods,interdisciplinary research methods,including theoretical deduction,literature research,case study,questionnaire and data analysis,are comprehensively adopted;(3)In terms of research thinking,research universities graduate interdisciplinary education model is discussed using knowledge production model reform theory,ecological system theory and educational ecological system.Meanwhile,a theoretical framework is proposed for the graduate interdisciplinary education model.On the basis of literature review,case study and empirical research,elements and their respective importance in research universities' graduate interdisciplinary education model are identified and analyzed.The conceptual model is built,and the internal logic and rule behind the operation of the graduate interdisciplinary education model is investigated.It is hoped that this research can provide valuable theoretical references for the graduate interdisciplinary education model system construction and offer practical guidance to reform and development of the graduate interdisciplinary education model in China. |
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