Richter et al., A cognitive framework for understanding the role of students’ expectations and motivations in interdisciplinary design collaboration Proceedings of the Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2009, Palm Cove, QLD 1 A cognitive framework for understanding the role of students’ expectations and motivations in interdisciplinary design collaboration David M. Richter Virginia Tech, USA richterd@vt.edu Marie C. Paretti Virginia Tech, USA mparetti@vt.edu Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of student expectations of and motivations for interdisciplinary collaboration using the concept of disciplinary egocentrism as a theoretical lens. Disciplinary egocentrism describes the inability to make productive connections between one’s own discipline and the interdisciplinary topic and/or other disciplines. This paper builds on the theory by examining how expectations and motivations hinder or promote students’ ability to cognitively engage in interdisciplinary collaboration. This approach provides an important link between the affective and cognitive domains, which in turn provides a critical framework for developing appropriate teaching practices. The findings are based on observations, interviews, and focus groups from a case study of an interdisciplinary green engineering capstone design course. The observation data shows significant gaps in students’ ability to communicate of their expectations, motivations, and understandings of design. This gap in communication in turn correlates with struggles to form a cohesive team across disciplinary boundaries and establish productive design collaborations quickly. The focus group and interview data enhance the observations by revealing notable disciplinary differences between expectations and motivations of the students enrolled in the course. This finding reveals an additional area in which students may need guidance to overcome before being able to successfully collaborate on interdisciplinary teams. Introduction With the proliferation of multi- and interdisciplinary topics being used in engineering courses and projects, researchers (Bradbeer, 1999; Fruchter & Lewis, 2001; O’Brien, Soibelman, & Elvin, 2003) have begun to analyse the barriers of interdisciplinarity. Building on this work, Richter (Richter, 2008) and Richter and Paretti (Richter & Paretti, 2009) performed research in an interdisciplinary content course and identified a cognitive barrier to interdisciplinarity, termed disciplinary egocentrism, based on Piaget’s construct of egocentrism from educational psychology. Disciplinary egocentrism refers to creating connections between an interdisciplinary topic and one’s discipline, termed relatedness, as well as identifying the contributions of other disciplines to the topic and one’s discipline, termed perspective. The construct provides a cognitive framework to analyse barriers to interdisciplinary learning and collaboration. To further explore the nature and effects of disciplinary egocentrism, the authors designed another study to focus on interdisciplinary collaboration in the context of engineering design. To guide this research, the authors developed several research questions, including:  How is disciplinary egocentrism manifest in interdisciplinary design collaboration?