Tools for Transformation

Funded Proposals

UW Worldwide

Department of Material Science and Engineering, College of Engineering

The goal of our project is to explore new approaches to the transformation of undergraduate education through the creation of multinational faculty/student projects across the disciplines. We call this basic approach to the internationalization of the curriculum UW Worldwide. With support from the Tools for Transformation fund, we are piloting a four-year version of our approach in a collaboration with Sichuan University, in Chengdu, China. The theme of the collaboration is "Scientific, Engineering and Social Challenges to the Environment in Washington State and Sichuan Province".

Our work on environmental challenges with Sichuan University incorporates five projects, each focussing on an issue of critical importance both to Washington State and Sichuan Province. The projects include forest ecology, hydrology and waste waster treatment, environmentally-friendly materials processing, biodiversity, and interactions of humans with the environment. Approximately 25 first-year students/year will join the program on both sides, starting in Fall 2000. In their freshman and sophomore years, the students work on their projects in parallel on their home campuses, exchanging ideas, data and designs with their Chinese peers via e-mail. In addition to their project-based activity, the students undertake an intensive study of the Chinese language, as well as a year-long seminar on Chinese History, Science and Society. In their junior year, the UW students travel to Sichuan Province to continue their projects, in collaboration with Sichuan University faculty and students. Similarly, the Sichuan University students will come to Washington. In their senior year, all of the students return to their home campuses to complete the degree requirements in their majors, as well as a senior thesis/design project. Faculty for our program are drawn from our Colleges of Arts and Science, Engineering and Forest Resources, providing an outstanding interdisciplinary experience for both students and staff.

Our evaluation plan incorporates an internal component, led by UW's Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching (CELT), and well as an external consultant. Results will be disseminated through publications and presentations, a web-based forum, a "how to" monograph, and collaboration with multi-university organizations. External partners in our project include the Washington State Office of Trade and Economic Development (OTED); the Washington State China Relations Council (WSCRC), the Northwest Environmental Business Council (NEBC), and the Washington-Sichuan Friendship Association (WSFA). External financial support has been received through a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education of the US Department of Education.

For more information about our project see the University of Washington - Sichuan University Joint Project on Higher Education Reform webpage.

Progress Report, July 2001

The Tools for Transformation grant for the UW Worldwide program supports the creation of new models of integrating international research and undergraduate education. We are piloting our multinational student/faculty project-based approach through a four-year collaborative project with Sichuan University, in Chengdu, China. The focus of the collaboration is on "Scientific, Engineering and Social Challenges to the Environment in Washington State and Sichuan Province". Since Tools for Transformation funding began in June of 2000, the UW Worldwide project has made a great deal of progress towards our goals. The first group of freshmen students joined the program in Fall Quarter 2000 and we are currently recruiting for Fall 2001. Faculty working on the program are drawn from the UW's Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Engineering and Forest Resources. External partners include the Washington State - Sichuan Province Friendship Association, the Washington State Office of Trade and Economic Development, the Northwest Environmental Business Council and the Washington State China Relations Council. In the past year the project has received a grant from the US Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, and has been designated as a national key experimental project in undergraduate education reform by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Activities in the 2000-2001 Academic Year

A group of 26 University of Washington freshmen participated in the pilot UW Worldwide program with Sichuan University in its first year. In parallel the first cohort of 30 freshmen students were recruited to the program at Sichuan University. There were three main components of the program for the students at UW in their freshman years. The first is student team-based research in five topical areas related to the environment, including forest ecology, water resource management, biodiversity, environmentally-friendly materials, and anthropology/archeology The research was launched within an umbrella project-based course in the Fall Quarter. The second component is Chinese language studies, which the students undertook in a special section dedicated to our program. The third component was a special yearlong seminar on Chinese Society, Science and Culture. A great deal of information about these various components of our program, including curricular materials for the research course, for the seminar on Chinese Society, Science and Culture, and for the special seminar on DNA Diversity, can be found on the web at: http://depts.washington.edu/global/uwsichuan/.

Student Research Activity

We launched the student project activities within the framework of a five credit project-based course. The students split into groups of 3-6 members in each of five areas: Anthropology/Archeology, Biodiversity, Eco-Materials, Forests, and Water. Each group worked with at least one professor and one graduate student. The course provided a general structure through which the students had the opportunity and responsibility to not only work on their research project but to prepare presentations and reports at mid-term and end of term and learn more about how research is conducted. All of the students participated actively and several groups produced projects by the end of the quarter that contributed new knowledge to their fields. For each of the five groups, the research activities during their freshmen year were designed to develop a platform of skills and understanding upon which their activities during their junior year in China can build. The students also communicated with the parallel project teams in China during the course of their work.

The Archeology students learned archeological techniques working on a project related to native cultures in the Northwest with Dr. Steven Harrell and a graduate student in Archeology, Robert Kopperl. Their project involved the study of an assemblage of animal bones from an archeological site on Kodiak Island, which uncovered materials that ranged from 6500 to 4000 years old. Students studied the changes through time in these remains of ancient meals and used this information as a way to look at the impact of hunting and fishing on local fauna through time.

Students in the Biodiversity group worked on a project in which they compared the geographic ranges of three species of the genus Mimulus, including two common species and one rare species. These students primarily used specimen cards from collection of the UW Herbarium for their data, and worked under the supervision of the Curator of the Herbarium, Prof. Richard Olmstead. They mapped the locations of all of the specimens and entered that information into GIS software. Then they compared the numbers and geographic ranges of the three species to try to determine whether the low numbers of the species classified as rare were accurate or an artifact of the collection locations and a misunderstanding of the range.

The Water group looked at a novel cooling project at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY and modeled its impact on Lake Cayuga. They worked under the guidance of Prof. Michael Brett, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Cornell University is in the process of building a cooling system to partially take the place of traditional air conditioning systems. Cold water from the bottom of neighboring Lake Cayuga is to be pumped up to the campus, used to cool the air and then pumped back down to the lake. Concerns have been raised about the effect on water quality of pumping this warmer water back into the lake. The students created models of the effect on lake temperature, productivity, and resultant water quality, learning general and powerful skills which will be applied later in China.

The Eco-Materials group's research focused on hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells for energy generation, working with Profs. Gretchen Kalonji and Brian Flinn. The students learned how to use all the necessary experimental equipment and did a study on the effect on power generation of changes in the materials processing of the platinum layer in polymer exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Their hope is to optimize the catalyst layer in these fuel cells for power generation at a lower cost and higher efficiency. The students compared the performance of fuel cells with Pt layers of variable thickness created by sputter coating with commercially produced Pt layers.

The Forest group worked with Prof. Tom Hinckley to learn research techniques and forestry basics by creating a CD-ROM for use by the Chinese students and others about forest management issues on the Olympic Peninsula. The students researched these issues, took field trips to the peninsula and used web software to create a linked set of pages containing their research and images and then put these pages onto a CD. The site/CD contains maps and references along with information on culture, conservation, regulations, settlement, geology/geography and some of the important species.

In addition to the activities which took place within the framework of the project-based course in the fall, a number of other activities were organized for the students during the winter and spring quarters. In the Winter Quarter 2001, Professor Ben Hall taught a course on DNA Diversity that he developed specifically for the UW Worldwide students, particularly the students participating in the biodiversity and forestry projects. This course presented an innovative introduction to biology and biochemistry with assignments and lectures specifically geared towards getting students ready to start using DNA and protein data to study evolution and diversity. The course consisted of lectures, readings and problem sets, as well as a final project and presentation. Professor Hall also put the course materials onto the worldwide web.

Professor Kalonji ran a seminar on fuel cells for the Eco-Materials students along with a senior undergraduate researcher who will continue to act as a mentor for this group when he becomes a graduate student this fall. In this seminar the students covered the underlying science governing the behavior of fuel cells, including the thermodynamics and kinetics. The seminar also offered a framework for the continuation of the lab work initiated by the materials group during the fall quarter. In the spring quarter, the materials group worked in a special lab section of the introductory materials science course, again, allowing them some curricular space to continue their research.

Chinese Language Studies

Most of our students began their Chinese language studies with the first-year Chinese sequence offered by the Asian Languages and Literature Department. Several of our students already had some Chinese language proficiency, and were tracked into second year Chinese. The UW Worldwide students who were beginners in Chinese had a reserved section of first-year Chinese with the same professor and teaching assistant throughout the year. Students with more advanced skills will meet to begin learning technical language related to their fields next fall. Other students will have a short course on Chinese language in environmental science when they arrive in China, during the summer before their junior year.

Special Seminar on Chinese Society, Science and Culture

Dr. Stevan Harell, Curator for East Asia for the Burke Museum and Professor of Anthropology, created a special year-long seminar tailored to the needs of our program. This seminar was structured with the environment of China as a central theme and the five research topics as the secondary themes for an examination of aspects of Chinese history and modern Chinese culture. Professor Harrell combined extensive readings, discussions, debates, traditional lectures and guest lectures to make up this seminar. This seminar was popular not only with the students but several faculty members, both in and out of the program, attended regularly. All of the materials are available on the web, and Prof. Harrell will be offering this course to a larger group of students again next year, an example of how the curriculum development underway through FIPSE support is beginning to effect a broader spectrum of students at UW.

Evaluation

Our evaluation strategy includes internal and external components. The local evaluation team in the first year was led by Prof. Cindy Atman, Director of the Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching (CELT). Several researchers worked under Prof. Atman's supervision, including Dr. Rie Nakamura (who left in March for a job at the Toyota Foundation), and Dr. Craig Lewis, who will be the lead player for Year 2 Another key member of the local evaluation team is Ms. Chia-lin Huang, a Ph.D, student in education who is fluent in both Chinese and English and particularly well-suited to address some of the communication challenges of our project.

In addition to the local evaluation process we engaged an external evaluator, Dr. Susan Millar, Director of the Learning through Evaluation Assessment and Dissemination (LEAD) Center. at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Millar made a site visit at the end of the school year and interviewed program faculty and students.

Program Successes

In terms of educational benefits for students, the early research experience has been very effective in promoting the students' confidence in their ability to be contributors to the solution of scientific and engineering problems. It has also been effective in giving them a broad interdisciplinary perspective on the nature of environmental challenges. The depth of their knowledge about Chinese language, history and culture is also truly unusual for first-year students, no doubt motivated very strongly by their project work with Chinese counterparts and by their upcoming year in China. As for the depth of their scientific knowledge, several of the groups had extraordinary opportunities to engage with the subject matter in new and thoughtful ways, particularly in the case of the special activities developed on DNA for the biodiversity and forestry groups and on the science of fuel cells for the materials group.

The faculty professional development components of our program have been particularly encouraging. One of the most powerful success stories of the program has been the impact it has had on faculty thinking about the way students learn, and what students are capable of accomplishing. Some faculty in the program initially expressed doubts about the abilities of freshmen to really do research. By the end of first quarter, the same faculty who had expressed those doubts before the program started had become leaders in working with the freshmen.

As for the ultimate sustainability of our project, we have grounds to be quite optimistic. The project enjoys the very strong support of the Washington State-Sichuan Province Friendship Association, a group consisting of governmental, trade and industrial groups interests in promoting interactions between our regions. The project has gotten very high visibility in both regions, and has the enthusiastic endorsement of state and provincial government on both sides.

Activities for the 2001-2002 Academic Year

In fall 2001, our second cohort of freshmen will enter the program. This cohort will undertake the same activities as we prepared for the first cohort last year, with some minor modifications. The research activities will be enriched by the fact that the teams already exist, and the current sophomores are eager to work with the freshmen in a mentoring capacity. We will also modify the first-year activities to include a little more structure in the research activities in the spring quarter, requiring the incoming cohort to make presentations at the end of the year regarding their research accomplishments and plans.

For the cohort who will be sophomores next year, a new set of activities will be implemented. They will be continuing their Chinese language studies, which is of course quite a consuming endeavor. They will also need to be taking a variety of required courses for their departments. To keep the group together, and to continue to focus some of their energies on their research projects, we will institute a weekly seminar in which the progress of the various teams will be reported. As this group will be leaving for China in June of next year, our main goal will be to have each group complete, in consultation with their Chinese peers, a research plan for their time in China by spring quarter, 2001.

The schedule for the exchange activities for the first cohort of students is as follows. As soon as the UW final exam period is over in June 2002, the first cohort of students (who will then have completed their sophomore year) will leave for Sichuan, together with a number of the UW faculty. All of the Chinese students and the US students will work together in China for the first summer. The Sichuan University students will leave for the US in early September, 2002, in time for fall quarter, 2002. The UW students will return to Seattle in June, 2003, allowing the two groups of students to work together in Seattle for their second summer. In the first summer in China, we are planning a retreat for all of the students and many of the faculty from both sides. This retreat will take place at a remote location in Sichuan Province, chosen for its ability to provide a focus for many of the research teams. The activity will also serve as an ice-breaker in bringing together for the first-time the student teams which will at that stage have only interacted electronically. Prof. Tom Hinckley of UW's College of Forest Resources, will be visiting Sichuan in August, 2001, to work on the planning of this ice-breaking retreat with counterparts at Sichuan University.

In the coming year, we plan to focus increasingly on our role in disseminating the results of our work to date, and on addressing issues of scale-up and sustainability. In addition to talks at conferences and other universities, we will begin to generate writing materials, both for publication and for our website, about the challenges and benefits of implementing such a multinational project-based approach.

Tools for Transformation Funded Proposals

The Provost's Office
provost@u.washington.edu
Modified: July 20, 2001