Can Students Practise Interdisciplinarity and Understand What It is They Are Doing?

This chapter investigates how students experience assessment on interdisciplinary modules, focusing on the relationship between practising interdisciplinarity and reflecting on it. Drawing on interview data from two contrasting case studies – a Master’s-level design-based module and a second-year undergraduate module structured around a formal interdisciplinary research process – the chapter analyses how assessment strategies shape students’ engagement with integration. Despite substantial differences in cohort, pedagogy, and assessment design, students in both modules reported a persistent tension between producing interdisciplinary outcomes and reflecting on the nature of their interdisciplinary reasoning. In one case, reflection appeared too late to guide practice; in the other, reflective structure sometimes felt detached from real-time problem solving. The findings suggest that reflection is essential for making integration explicit, but can also disrupt or delay students’ sense of “doing” interdisciplinarity when poorly aligned with activity. Rather than treating this tension as a design flaw, the chapter argues that it is structurally inherent to interdisciplinary education and must be managed pedagogically by integrating reflective practice more closely with the processes of inquiry and decision-making.