Cultivation of Interdisciplinary Innovative Thinking Empowered with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Intrinsic Mechanism and Model Construction

Under the background of the increasingly rapid trend of disciplinary integration, cultivating students’ interdisciplinary innovative thinking has become one of the key goals of contemporary education. As a breakthrough technology in the era of artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents significant opportunities and challenges for the empowerment of education with technology. Based on this, focused on the interdisciplinary education field, this paper firstly elucidated the basic connotation and classification of interdisciplinary innovative thinking and then summarized four occurrence elements of interdisciplinary innovative thinking of a multidisciplinary knowledge base, fundamental innovative thinking skills, team communication and collaboration, and output orientation. Secondly, the four core functions of generative AI in empowering the cultivation of interdisciplinary innovative thinking were analyzed, which included efficient information retrieval and integration, multi-turn dialogues and role-play, evaluation and feedback, generation and creation. Accordingly, the intrinsic mechanisms of the cultivation of interdisciplinary innovative thinking empowered with generative AI was claried. Finally, from the integrated perspective of teaching, learning and evaluation pre class-in class-post class, and based on the design-oriented production-based learning (DoPBL) model, a teaching model for cultivating interdisciplinary innovative thinking empowered by generative AI was constructed. Through research, this paper was expected to provide theoretical and practical reference for how to cultivate students’ interdisciplinary innovative thinking in the age of AI.