Collaboration Across Cultures: An Evaluation of Teaching Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Indonesia

A first step toward teaching statistics and data science students to become effective interdisciplinary collaborators is to identify what collaboration skills should be taught. The ASCCR (Attitude, Structure, Content, Communication, Relationship) framework for collaboration has shown evidence of effectiveness for teaching collaboration in the United States, where it was developed. To test how applicable ASCCR would be in a different setting, we adapted ASCCR into Indonesian language and culture to teach collaboration skills to undergraduate statistics and data science majors in Indonesia. Our results revealed evidence that the adapted framework was relevant for teaching and learning interdisciplinary collaboration skills in an Indonesian tertiary setting. Students self-reported that they learned the collaboration skills, felt prepared for their collaboration projects, applied the skills to their projects, and performed well in their collaborations with domain experts. Domain experts generally agreed that students demonstrated effective collaboration skills and performed well on the projects. We conclude that the ASCCR framework can be adapted for additional languages and cultures to teach interdisciplinary collaboration effectively. We recommend adapting and teaching ASCCR to help students collaborate to apply statistics and data science towards the ultimate goal of benefitting society.