Research Status, Hotspots, Prospects of Interdisciplinary Learning in China’s Primary and Secondary Schools over the Past Decade: A CiteSpace-based Visual Analysis

Interdisciplinary learning has become a critical path for cultivating students’ core competencies in China’s primary and secondary schools. Over the past decade, substantial progress has been made in theoretical and practical research on the learning. This study employs CiteSpace to visualize research trends, author collaboration networks, institutional distributions, and keyword co-occurrence patterns. The results show that 2022–2024 was a period of rapid development for research in interdisciplinary learning. However, the collaboration remained limited, with universities as the primary publishing institutions. Regarding research content, two dominant themes emerged: orienting the learning toward core competencies and generating overarching concepts to reveal underlying interdisciplinary logic. A third theme focused on rectifying conceptual misunderstandings through specific disciplinary perspectives. Building on this thematic analysis, future research should prioritize two foundational steps: integrating the five educational domains into the interdisciplinary learning design and establishing collaborative teaching-research communities. Additionally, in-depth lesson studies should be conducted to systematically refine implementation strategies.