  As interdisciplinary courses are developed, instructors and researchers have
to grapple with questions of how students should make connections across
disciplines. We explore the issue of interdisciplinary reconciliation (IDR):
how students reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas from different
disciplines. While IDR has elements in common with other frameworks for the
reconciliation of ideas across contexts, it differs in that each disciplinary
idea is considered canonically correct within its own discipline. The setting
for the research is an introductory physics course for biology majors that
seeks to build greater interdisciplinary coherence and therefore includes
biologically relevant topics such as ATP and chemical bond energy. In our
case-study data, students grapple with the apparent contradiction between the
energy released when the phosphate bond in ATP is broken and the idea that an
energy input is required to break a bond. We see students justifying
context-dependent modeling choices, showing nuance in articulating how system
choices may be related to disciplinary problems of interest. This represents a
desired endpoint of IDR, in which students can build coherent connections
between concepts from different disciplines while understanding each concept in
its own disciplinary context. Our case study also illustrates elements of the
instructional environment that play roles in the process of IDR.
