Assessment of Boundary Crossing

WORKSHOP TITLE ASSESSMENT OF BOUNDARY CROSSING J. Gulikers a,1, Fortuin, K., Oonk, C., Tho, C., Ramezzano, C.b a Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9318-312X b Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands, Conference Key Areas: Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills, Curriculum development and emerging curriculum models in engineering Keywords: Boundary crossing, assessment, innovative learning environments, transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity ABSTRACT Innovative learning environments in engineering education—such as interdisciplinary learning, challenge-based learning, and living labs—require students to collaborate across disciplinary, cultural, and societal boundaries. This is essential for addressing complex, sustainability-related challenges. A key competence in these settings is boundary crossing: the ability to recognize, seek, appreciate and utilize tensions that emerge when diverse perspectives interact. Although many curricula strive to foster this competence, its assessment remains a significant challenge. Conventional assessment methods often fail to align with the open-ended, dynamic, and process-oriented nature of boundary crossing. Key issues include the diversity of intended learning outcomes, the need to balance disciplinary depth with transversal skills, and the difficulty of assessing developmental processes rather than end products. While reflective methods are commonly used, they also have limitations—for instance, the risk of superficial reflection and the emerging influence of AI tools on written outputs. This workshop invites participants to explore the why, what, and how of assessing boundary crossing competence in engineering education. Drawing on three realworld examples from a Life Sciences university in the Netherlands, participants will critically examine existing practices and co-create innovative assessment strategies tailored to their own contexts. Using interactive methods such as Think-Pair-Share and the collaborative digital tool Padlet, the workshop will foster dialogue and shared insight. Outcomes from the session will be collected and disseminated, with opportunities for continued exchange and collaboration beyond the event. 1 Corresponding Author J. Gulikers [email protected] 2 BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE 2.2 Introduction Many engineering education curricula are increasingly integrating innovative learning environments that require students to learn and co-create with others. Examples include interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education, challenge-based learning, living labs, and community-engaged learning. While these pedagogies differ in their specific emphasis, they share a common feature: students must engage with diverse perspectives while addressing real-world, open-ended—often sustainability-related— problems (Horn et al., 2024; O’Sullivan, 2024; Visscher et al., 2022). These complex challenges require students to co-create knowledge across disciplinary, cultural, and societal (non-academic) boundaries. Embedding such learning in engineering curricula is essential, as real-world sustainability challenges—those our graduates will face—cannot be solved within disciplinary silos (Heijmans & Eweg, 2023). Therefore, students must become attuned to viewing issues beyond the confines of their own disciplinary perspective. Regardless of the type of boundaries students are asked to cross, researchers increasingly emphasize that boundary crossing competence is critical (Fortuin et al., 2020; Vereijken et al., 2022). 1.2 Boundary Crossing Competence Fortuin and colleagues (2024) argue for the explicit integration of boundary crossing competence in engineering education. They define boundary crossing as “the ability to seek, recognise, appreciate and utilize tensions that arise when different practices meet” (p. 216). Such tensions emerge when students engage with open-ended, complex, or even wicked problems that require transcending disciplinary perspectives and engage with extra-academic stakeholders (O’Sullivan et al., 2025 The ability to seek, recognise, appreciate, and productively work with these tensions is vital—both for co-creating innovative yet feasible solutions, and for supporting students in developing a robust professional identity (Craps et al., 2021; Fortuin et al., 2024). Students must learn to approach real-world problems from multiple angles and collaborate with relevant stakeholders. In the context of engineering education, this especially applies to technically-oriented students, who must also engage with the societal dimensions of engineering—such as ethical considerations and the (un)sustainability of technical solutions (Heijmans & Eweg, 2023). This requires capabilities like active listening, empathy, critical reflection on one’s own perspective and value system, dealing with friction, stepping out of one’s comfort zone, and integrating diverse forms of knowledge (e.g., Veltman et al., 2019; Horn et al., 2023; O’Sullivan, 2024). By engaging with boundary-crossing contexts and real-world challenges, students not only become more aware of others’ perspectives—they also gain insight into their own disciplinary, cultural, and academic assumptions. This type of learning extends beyond the cognitive domain, touching upon students’ values and belief systems, which play a central role in navigating complex, real-life challenges. Although many educational programs are increasingly designing learning environments that foster such boundary-crossing experiences, the assessment of this learning remains a black box—or at the very least, a significant challenge (van de Beemt et al., 2022; Doulougeri et al., 2024). 1.3. Assessment of boundary crossing Assessing boundary crossing competence poses significant challenges for multiple reasons. First, when students engage in complex, open-ended, real-life learning situations that require collaboration across diverse practices, it is often impossible to predefine all the learning outcomes in advance. Developing innovative solutions requires both the integration of existing knowledge (Hadorn et al., 2008; Horn et al., 2023) and the co-creation of new knowledge (Scardamalia et al., 2012). Second, students are likely to learn different things based on their disciplinary backgrounds, personal trajectories, and specific contributions to the learning process. For instance, students from different disciplines enter with varying perspectives, engage in different roles within group dynamics, and thus develop unique learning outcomes (Horn et al., 2023). As Baggen et al. (2022) emphasize, assessment in such environments must allow space for “learning surprises.” Similarly, Looman et al. (2022) argue that assessment should focus on making the implicit explicit. These approaches, however, often conflict with institutional norms that emphasize predefined, uniform learning objectives—typically cognitive in nature—that can be easily “ticked off.” Third, striking a balance between disciplinary depth and cross-disciplinary breadth— including the development of generic skills—is often reported as a key tension. This complicates the alignment among learning goals, actual student learning, and assessment criteria (van den Beemt et al., 2020; Böhm, 2024; Heller et al., 2024). Fourth, assessing boundary crossing—particularly in open-ended learning environments—often requires a shift in focus from assessing the product to assessing the process of learning (Gulikers & Oonk, 2019; Knickel et al., 2019). Knickel and colleagues, for example, developed a reflective framework enabling all partners involved in co-creation to collaboratively reflect on the learning process during the project. This implies that assessment should not be confined to the end of the learning experience but should be integrated throughout as an ongoing, formative practice. In assessment terms, this means shifting from a predominantly summative focus—judging learning outcomes for grading purposes—toward a formative approach that enhances students’ awareness of their own learning and informs further development (Schellekens et al., 2021). Finally, the choice of assessment methods is itself a challenge. Reflective methods—such as reflection reports or self-assessments—are commonly used to capture students’ experiences and learning related to boundary crossing (Nguyen & Condry, 2023; Redman et al., 2021). While reflection is indeed essential to recognizing and articulating learning, these methods face several limitations. Students may not clearly understand what they are expected to reflect on, resulting in shallow reflections or “tick-the-box” behavior. Additionally, overuse of reflective assignments can lead to “reflection fatigue.” In the current era of generative AI, relying heavily on written reflection reports also raises questions of authenticity and validity. In sum, boundary crossing competence is a critical feature of innovative learning environments where students co-create solutions for open-ended, real-world problems. However, assessing this competence remains a complex endeavor in higher engineering education, as it challenges longstanding assumptions and practices regarding educational quality and assessment. This workshop presents three concrete examples from a Dutch Life Sciences university, each demonstrating a different approach to assessing boundary crossing. These cases serve as starting points for an interactive session in which participants are invited to share their own experiences, critically explore the why and what of assessing boundary crossing, and collaboratively generate innovative ideas on how to assess this essential yet elusive competence. 2 WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES 2.1. Target audience The workshop invites educators and educational researchers who are working with or studying learning in innovative learning environments where students have to learn and co-create across boundaries while working on a real-world, open-ended, often sustainability related problem. This can be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, intercultural, community-engaged environments, learning environments where technical students and social science students are brought together, living labs, challenge-based or something the like. 2.2. Expected learning outcomes The workshop will be grounded in research on boundary crossing, as well as on assessment in open-ended learning environments within engineering education. This workshop intends to challenge peoples thinking about assessment in openended learning environments where students have to engage in boundary crossing. Furthermore, it intend to share concrete experiences and approaches to assessment of boundary crossing in innovative learning environments. By doing so the workshop intend to build a collaborative framework on the why, what and how of assessing boundary crossing in engineering education: - Why do we want to assess boundary crossing in innovative learning environments in engineering education? - What do we actually want to assess when assessing students’ boundary crossing competence? - How do we assess – or want to assess – students’ boundary crossing competence? That is, what kinds of assessment methods and approaches do we – want to – use? Even though the Why and the What can also be debated upon, the interactive part of the workshop will focus on the How question. The why and the what will be laid down during the presentation and interactive discussion, while during actual workshop part, participants collaboratively develop innovative ideas on the how of this assessment. 3 WORKSHOP DESIGN 3.1 setup and activities The workshop will start interactively gauging participants first ideas on the why, what and how of boundary crossing assessment. After an interactive start a short introduction will explain what boundary crossing is and lay down arguments for the why and the what of boundary crossing assessment in engineering education. Three three examples of boundary crossing assessment developed within a Life Sciences University in the Netherlands will be discussed: - the use of the boundary crossing Rubric (Gulikers & Oonk, 2019) in a Master Course in Environmental Sciences - The use of a longitidinal boundary crossing portfolio and interview in a biobased Science master programme - And the co-creationg of successcriteria (To et al., 2021) for boundary crossing (self-) assessment together with bachelor students of Marine Sciences. Following this theoretical and practical introduction, participants will engage in smallgroup discussions in which they can share their own experiences, research findings, or conceptual perspectives on assessing boundary crossing competence. Throughout the workshop, we will employ two key facilitation strategies and tools: • the Think–Pair–Share approach (individual reflection, small-group discussion, and whole-group sharing), and • Padlet as a digital pinboard to collect, visualize, and organize participants’ contributions. Together, these tools will support the collaborative generation and harvesting of ideas, ensuring that all perspectives are captured and that participants leave the session with both inspiration and concrete ideas for their own educational contexts. 3.2 Interactivity As mentioned before, interactivity will be invited in several ways, using think-pairshare and padlet as a digital pinboard - Interactive startup using Wooclap included in the powerpoint to gauge particiants prior knowledge on the why, what and how of assessment of boundary crossing in engineering education (= think) - After the presentation, participants will be invited in small groups to share and co-create ideas or experiences on how boundary crossing competence can/should be assessed (= pair). They are invited to put their ideas on the digital pinboard Padlet - In the wrap up we will collaboratively review the inputs of all groups on padlet (= share), and illuminate some lessons learned in the group. 4 WORKSHOP RESULTS The workshop discussions, as well as many discussions and keynotes at SEFI, stressed the importance of bringing engineering students in learning situations in which they have to navigate wicked problems. However, we do not assess their actual learning from working on these problems with multiple disciplines, ethical or political perspectives, societal stakeholders or users. For example, a presentation of Routhe and colleagues (SEFI 2025) on interdisciplinary multiteam learning, concluded that this interdisciplinary multiteam learning was not part of the learning outcomes nor the assessments. Also the keynote of Chance and Borsen stressed the importance of rethinking assessment frameworks to properly address ethicial decision making in engineering. Moreover, it seemed difficult to think about assessment as something that is not for grading (i.e., summative assessment), but for making learning visible, letting student become aware of their learning and steer further learning (i.e. formative assessment). Participants feel restricted to organisational contexts and regulations in which using written reports or exams and grades on a ten point scale are a necessity. The main topics discussed during the workshop were: 1) The importance of operationalising what Boundary Crossing means in your context. Participants were challenged to think about “what do you want to see/hear your students do when they are crossing (disciplinary, societal, cultural) boundaries?” This refers to the WHAT of our assessment. Because this is a difficult question to answer, we all tend to fall back on what we do know, which is assessing disciplinary knowledge elements. We agreed that assessing boundary crossing requires more process oriented learning outcomes like “students visualise conflicting perspectives (i.e. boundaries) they encountered and describe how they navigated these” or “students reflect on what they learned about their own values and assumptions by being confronted with other perspectives” or “Students can make concrete how various disciplinary perspectives had added value for the final product”. One participant reflected that these type of learning outcomes would allow her more to assess students who go to a variety of internships in which they will be encountering different problems and different boundaries. 2) Participants find it challenging to think outside-the-box for activities, formats, methods that can be used to make boundary crossing learning visible and thereby “assessable” (albeit not on a 10-point scale). Though some examples were posted on the padlet: the Rich Pictures using PRESS criteria as was presented by Cooke at al (SEFI 2025) or using perspective maps instead of mindmaps. We also talked about using reflective methods to let students share their boundary crossing experiences. An important critical note here is: if we do not know WHAT students need to show regarding their boundary crossing, then a reflection (= a HOW) will be difficult to evaluate. Simply asking students “reflect on your boundary crossing experiences” will not lead to deep reflection as also elaboratively discussed during the SEFI Keynote of Pleun Hermsen. All in all, participants realised, first, the importance of reconsidering WHY we want to assess in our innovative (interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, challenge-based etc) engineering learning environments and whether grading is needed and a more process focus should be more fit-for-purpose. Second, operationalising the WHAT (i.e. what is “boundary crossing learning” (of interdisciplinary / transdisciplinary learning ) is challenging, but necessary to move assessment practices forward and refrain from improper use of reflection methods. REFERENCES Baggen, Y., Lans, T., & Gulikers, J. (2022). Making Entrepreneurship Education Available to All: Design Principles for Educational Programs Stimulating an Entrepreneurial Mindset. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, 5(3), 347-374. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515127420988517 Bohm, N. (2024). Educating uncertainty: How students and teachers deal with uncertainty in transdisciplionary courses on urban sustainability. [promoter, other, Delft University of Technology]. https://doi.org/10.7480/abe.2024.18 Craps, S., Pinxten, M., Knipprath, H., & Langie, G. (2021). Different roles, different demands. A competency-based professional roles model for early career engineers, validated in industry and higher education. European Journal of Engineering Education, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2021.1889468 Doulougeri, K., Vermunt, J. D., Bombaerts, G., & Bots, M. (2024). Challenge-based learning implementation in engineering education: A systematic literature review. Journal of Engineering Education, 113(4), 1076-1106. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20588 Fortuin, K. P. J., Gulikers, J. T. M., Post Uiterweer, N. C., Oonk, C., & Tho, C. W. S. (2024). Developing a boundary crossing learning trajectory: supporting engineering students to collaborate and co-create across disciplinary, cultural and professional practices. European Journal of Engineering Education, 49(2), 212-235. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2023.2219234 Fortuin, K., Uiterweer, N., Gulikers, J., Oonk, C., & Tho, C. (2020). Training students to cross boundaries between disciplines, cultures, and between university and society: Developing a boundary crossing learning trajectory. Proceeding SEFI conference 2020, Enschede, the Netherlands. https://www.4tu.nl/cee/Publications/480-sefi2020-fortuin.pdf Gulikers, J., & Oonk, C. (2019). Towards a Rubric for Stimulating and Evaluating Sustainable Learning. Sustainability, 11(4), 969. https://www.mdpi.com/20711050/11/4/969 Heijmans, A., & Eweg, R. (2023). Transformative research and education in Living Labs using the SDGs as a compass. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 24(9), 335-354. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-11-2022-0350 Helker, K., Bruns, M., Reymen, I. M., & Vermunt, J. D. A framework for capturing student learning in challenge-based learning. Active Learning in Higher Education, 0(0), 14697874241230459. https://doi.org/10.1177/14697874241230459 Horn, A., Scheffelaar, A., Urias, E., & Zweekhorst, M. B. M. (2023). Training students for complex sustainability issues: a literature review on the design of interand transdisciplinary higher education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 24(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-03-2021-0111 Horn, A., Visser, M. W., Pittens, C. A. C. M., Urias, E., Zweekhorst, M. B. M., & van Dijk, G. M. (2024). Transdisciplinary learning trajectories: developing action and attitude in interplay [Article]. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), Article 149. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02541-w Knickel, M., Knickel, K., Galli, F., Maye, D., & Wiskerke, J. S. C. (2019). Towards a Reflexive Framework for Fostering Co—Learning and Improvement of Transdisciplinary Collaboration. Sustainability, 11(23), 6602. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/23/6602 Looman, N., de Graaf, J., Thoonen, B., van Asselt, D., de Groot, E., Kramer, A., Scherpbier, N., & Fluit, C. (2022). Designing the learning of intraprofessional collaboration among medical residents. Medical Education, 56(10), 1017-1031. Nguyen JJ and Condry DLJ (2023) Evaluating differences in community-engaged learning and service-learning via the context, input, process, and product model. Front. Educ. 8:1289322. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1289322 O’Sullivan, G. (2025). U-shaped learning: a new model for transdisciplinary education. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12(1), 182. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04478-8 O’Sullivan, G., Baggen, Y., Tho, C., Georgiou, D., Pennings, H. J. M., & van den Beemt, A. (2025). The role of academic and extra-academic actors in transdisciplinary challenge-based learning. Teaching in Higher Education, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2468978 Redman, A., Wiek, A., & Barth, M. (2021). Current practice of assessing students’ sustainability competencies: a review of tools. Sustainability Science, 16(1), 117135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00855-1 Scardamalia, M., Bransford, J., Kozma, B., & Quellmalz, E. (2012). New Assessments and Environments for Knowledge Building. In P. Griffin, B. McGaw, & E. Care (Eds.), Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (pp. 231-300). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2324-5_5 To, J., Panadero, E., & Carless, D. (2021). A systematic review of the educational uses and effects of exemplars. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134 Van den Beemt, A., MacLeod, M., Van der Veen, J., Van de Ven, A., van Baalen, S., Klaassen, R., & Boon, M. (2020). Interdisciplinary engineering education: A review of vision, teaching, and support. Journal of Engineering Education, 109(3), 508-555. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20347 Veltman, M. E., Van Keulen, J., & Voogt, J. M. (2019). Design principles for addressing wicked problems through boundary crossing in higher professional education. Journal of Education and Work, 32(2), 135-155. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2019.1610165 Vereijken, M. W. C., Akkerman, S. F., te Pas, S. F., van der Tuin, I., & Kluijtmans, M. (2022). ‘Undisciplining’ higher education without losing disciplines: furthering transformative potential for students. Higher Education Research & Development, 114. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2156482 Visscher, K., Johnson, C., MacLeod, M., & van der Veen, J. (2022). Multi-, interand transdisciplinarity in challenge-based engineering education. In H.-M. Järvinen, S. Silvestre, A. Llorens, & B. Nagy (Eds.), SEFI 2022 50th Annual Conference of The European Society for Engineering Education, 19-22 September, Barcelona, Spain. https://doi.org/10.5821/conference-9788412322262.1176