For many years integral approaches of curriculum development have been popular. The complaint was that school subjects were too isolated, universities suffered from overspecialisation and fragmentation, and that interdisciplinary education was badly needed. Examples of interdisciplinary approaches were social science in secondary and world orientation in elementary education. New subjects like beta and technology and design and research are more recent examples. In higher education there is a lot of attention for interdisciplinarity as problems in reality do not present themselves according to disciplinary lines. There are even a very limited higher education study programs which can be named mono-disciplinary. However, the empirical foundation of the pedagogy of interdisciplinary education is lacking. Elsbeth Spelt was among the first researchers who noted that. She started to study pedagogical rules for interdisciplinary education. Her first publication Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic review (Elisabeth JH Spelt, Harm JA Biemans, Hilde Tobi, Pieternel A Luning, Martin Mulder) (2009). Educational Psychology Review. Volume 21, Issue 4, Pages 365-378, investigated research on this issue, and concluded with a model for interdisciplinary education analysis. We are waiting to see more from her since she has analysed a course on Food Quality Management at Wageningen University. From this research it is expected that the efficacy of design rules for interdisciplinary education are tested.
