(31d) Project-Based Learning and Education Abroad: A Poorly Exploited Synergy?

For several years, undergraduate chemical engineering students from WPI have conducted biochemical engineering research in the labs at l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Industries Chimiques in Nancy, France. They worked for some of Europe's foremost researchers in life science and bioengineering. Projects included kinetics of drug release from alginate-protein matrices, polymerization in micro emulsion reactors, and pollutant tracking in the Meurthe and Moselle rivers. Students returning from this program frequently win local academic competitions and become co-authors on papers published in research journals.

This past year, three chemical and environmental engineering students traveled to Shanghai and conducted research at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. They helped contribute to SJTU's long standing commitment to solving the daunting pollution issues in China's most prosperous and eclectic city. Their work examined reactor engineering problems in up-flow anaerobic sludge digesters, drinking water purification with ultrafiltration membranes, and ammonia removal from landfill leachate. While working fulltime with SJTU faculty and graduate students these students gained the well-known benefits of undergraduate research while at the same time learned about Chinese culture, struggled with the language, and negotiated life in suburban Shanghai.

In another part of Asia, a chemical engineering student working alongside WPI students from other majors investigated risk communication issues in the Rayong province of Thailand. They examined three public health issues?HIV/AIDS, motorcycle accidents, and petrochemical pollution. Their purpose was to understand how communication problems shape local understanding and possible solutions to these important public health issues. Rather than work in labs, they were in the local community interviewing government officials, public health organizations, and local residents. By synthesizing and analyzing a large amount of qualitative data from disparate sources, they could make informed recommendations to their Thai sponsors.

A continent away in South Africa two chemical engineering students and two biomedical engineering students studied flooding problems in an informal settlement outside of Cape Town. The settlements, remnants of apartheid, are vulnerable to increasing flooding incidents that result in serious health problems, affect livelihoods, and cause property damage. Using case studies, interviews, and field work the team helped the local community begin to understand the complex social, geographical, political, and economic forces contributing to the problem. Recommendations included specific means for building community capacity, more efficient flood risk data collection, and improved avenues of communication to minimize flood damage.

These examples represent a variety of experiences, contexts, and outcomes. They are not isolated anecdotes from a select few chemical engineers, fortunate enough to travel abroad, but they are the norm for several hundred WPI students who participate each year in our Global Perspectives Program (GPP). And, despite their variety they have elements in common---they are all project-based learning (PBL) experiences conducted in international locations. Although PBL has been part of WPI's curriculum for over 35 years, it is only in the last 10-12 years that the global program expanded to become the largest in engineering education. During that time we've learned a great deal about necessary elements of program design and implementation, and the synergy that comes from doing PBL abroad.

As described elsewhere: ?The GPP instructional design is based upon situated learning theory that includes authentic activities, contexts, and assessments. It provides collaborative knowledge construction and opportunities for explicit articulation of knowledge during the learning process (Herrington & Oliver, 2000; Brown & Palinscar, 1989; Brown, et al, 1989). Authentic learning environments seek to place students in situations that mimic the way knowledge will be used in professional practice. Learners have access to both WPI and host country experts, and in some sense are engaged through a process of initiation much like the apprentice-learning model (Dewey, 1974). Collaborative activities provide multiple roles, and multiple opportunities to engage material (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Bruer, 1993). For students to become full members of a community of practice, it is essential that they have opportunities for legitimate participation in the practices of that community. Our off-campus experience is designed to start that process.

Assessments that are consistent with this instructional design are usually performance-based (Loacker, 2000; Mentkowski, 2000). Most other colleges provide these elements in senior level courses. Providing them at lower levels of the curriculum can be problematic since the traditional assumption is that students must learn fundamentals before they can successfully attack significant open-ended problems. How can students solve difficult open-ended interdisciplinary problems before they've actually learned some of what they need to know in order to solve them? How can they do this in foreign culture when a significant language barrier exists? The answer lies in proper preparation, project and team management, and in providing multidimensional assessments that support the academic enterprise. The assessment network functions at multiple levels, and absence of any one level seriously degrades the student learning process. Assessment is used for continuous improvement of all program aspects.? (DiBiasio, D. and N. Mello, Assessing a Nontraditional Study Abroad Program in the Engineering Discipline, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 10, 237-252, 2004).

We will briefly describe the GPP and its relation to WPI's learning outcomes and those explicated in ABET's Criterion 3. Although transformational learning during study abroad is well-known, we will present additional assessment results that show how international PBL satisfies student learning outcomes at levels significantly higher than on-campus PBL. These results are consistent with those recently presented by others (VandeBerg, M. Assessment Research for Optimizing Student Learning Abroad: the Georgetown Consortium Study. in NSF Grantee Conference. Purdue University, October 31 2007 and the Study Abroad for Global Engagement work at U. Minnesota: http://cehd.umn.edu/projects/sage/news.html) regarding the value of experiential education abroad programs. These studies describe broader and larger assessment projects that validate the need for proper design and facilitation, the value of non-classroom learning, and the positive impact of short-term programs with those attributes.

Our presentation's goal is not to simply review the WPI program, but to communicate elements of structure, instructional design, student preparation, and student mentoring that are transferable to others wishing to include effective global experiences in their curriculum. The abroad experience itself can be transformed from the ?ordinary? to one that advances student learning in many dimensions, technical, professional, and personal.

ChE students at WPI have the highest participation rate on campus with 80-85% going off-campus each year. This comes from the discipline with the most restrictive degree requirements, but we believe is further illustration of how multiple outcomes can be met with global experiences. Additionally we will present other demographic data with interesting consequences. For example, women at WPI participate in the GPP at rates nearly double the on-campus demographic. This has consequences for recruiting but also for addressing what is currently a target underrepresented minority group in study abroad: male, engineering students.

The beauty of well-designed, well-managed, project-based international experiences is that they incorporate many of the outcomes we want to add to the curriculum: open-ended problem solving, teaming, project management, communication skills, cultural awareness, critical thinking, developing research skills, and dealing with ambiguity, ethics, and economics. The challenge is making it all happen in an already crowded curriculum. We hope the presentation will generate discussion and thinking about how that can be accomplished.