Cognitive Strategies in STEM Education: Supporting the Development of Engineers’ Multi- and Cross-Disciplinary Competence

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) ushers accelerated pace of innovation with the digital technologies and computing advances that requires urgent upskilling and reskilling the workforce. An educational response to this urgent need compels Higher Education Intuitions (HEIs) to re-evaluate their programs to develop a STEM-literate workforce capable of making informed decisions given the complexities of today's world and to open up opportunities to fill the growing need for STEM professionals. The objectives of combining multiple engineering approaches and technologies are to resolve real world problems, to provide different perspectives on real word complex problems, to create comprehensive research questions, to develop consensus definitions and guidelines, and to promote improved engineering services that address 21st century problems. Reasoning modalities have been the subject of interest and debate for the past decades in engineering education and for STEM in general. This study attempts to understand the various thinking modalities for multi-disciplinary engineering students. We also question the appropriate thinking strategy for cross-disciplinary engineering technology students given the 4IR-induced evolving workplace. A comprehensive literature review of empirical articles is also provided, which is aligned with the research questions published in scholarly journals over the past two decades and reveals the state of scientific thinking on these topics. Preliminary results informs instructional pedagogies on multidisciplinary engineering and cross-disciplinary engineering technology programs to exploit the capabilities of the 4IR innovations.