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The transfer of knowledge within and across disciplines remains a compelling challenge for modern STEM education and further research is needed to expand on the student-exhibited cognitive and affective gains achieved by innovative cross-disciplinary STEM instructional techniques. This study seeks to support crossdisciplinary STEM instruction and learning by investigating how students use the first law of thermodynamics, a crucial principle to the crosscutting concept of energy and matter, to bridge across disciplinary boundaries. An interview study was undertaken wherein chemistry-, engineering-, and physics-major students addressed a common set of conceptual prompts written with different field-specific conventions. This report focuses on students’ interpretations of the provided forms of the first law and work equations between prompts. Emergent findings demonstrate field-specific interpretations of arbitrary differences in convention and strong barriers to transfer. Derived implications inform suggestions for scaffolding across such disciplinary differences and for future work in this area. 

A widespread call has been made to develop and support more integrated approaches to STEM education. The first law of thermodynamics serves as a guiding principle for the crosscutting concept of energy and matter. A qualitative interview study was undertaken to support integrated approaches to STEM education by exploring how chemistry, physics, and engineering students (n = 40) transfer first law concepts across disciplinary contexts. Acquired interview data were analysed through the lens of the dynamic transfer framework to reveal the underlying contextual elements students used to know with. Emergent trends across the disciplines revealed how these applied reasoning approaches and epistemologies were realised by each discipline. Productive transfer is shown to be facilitated by the coordination of different disciplinary epistemologies. Suggestions are made to practitioners on how to support students in applying different reasoning approaches when addressing first law problems. The applied methods also serve as a promising methodology for future investigation of students’ transfer of crosscutting concepts.