Natural phenomena and scientific issues are intrinsically interdisciplinary. Students need to study a variety of academic disciplines in the natural sciences to explain a phenomenon or its related problems. Our goal in the current study was to examine the epistemological foundation of students’ interdisciplinary understanding of carbon cycling using the supervised latent Dirichlet allocation model. The 454 students in this study were from a public high school and a public research university in Texas. The students’ interdisciplinary understanding was shown in each of the constructed response items. In the relationship between the proportion of interdisciplinarity in students’ answers to the constructed response items and students’ scores on interdisciplinary understanding, all integrations of disciplines were statistically significant in explaining students’ interdisciplinary understanding. Moreover, one particular integration set had advantages for obtaining a high score. We found that science coursework contributed to students’ interdisciplinary understanding in different ways, and this interdisciplinary understanding was influenced by the number and type of science courses taken. Characterizing interdisciplinarity based on the clusters of science disciplines provided insights into how students synthesize their knowledge. The significance of this study lies in its potential impact on diverse curricular and instructional approaches in interdisciplinary science education.

自然现象和科学问题本质上是跨学科的。学生需要学习自然科学中的各种学科来解释一种现象或其相关问题。我们当前研究的目标是使用监督潜在狄利克雷分配模型来检查学生对碳循环的跨学科理解的认识论基础。这项研究的 454 名学生来自德克萨斯州的一所公立高中和一所公立研究型大学。每个构建的回答项目都显示了学生的跨学科理解。在学生对所构建的回答项目的回答中跨学科比例与学生跨学科理解得分之间的关​​系中，所有学科的整合在解释学生的跨学科理解方面都具有统计显着性。而且，一套特定的整合集具有获得高分的优势。我们发现科学课程以不同的方式促进学生的跨学科理解，而这种跨学科理解受到所修科学课程的数量和类型的影响。基于科学学科集群的跨学科特征为学生如何综合知识提供了见解。这项研究的意义在于它对跨学科科学教育中多样化课程和教学方法的潜在影响。