Modeling Knowledge Transfer and the Transdisciplinary Effect on Project-based Learning Activities

Each scientific project or publication can be attributed to several fields of study with different degrees. Call interdisciplinary distribution the set of the degrees. If we have fixed number of fields of study, the set can be written in vector form. Each component of the vector corresponds to one of the fields of study. Call the vector the interdisciplinary vector. If we consider a scientist to be a set of his or her publications we can get the vector for a scientist as a weighted sum of a vector of his or her publications. This paper is devoted to an approach to the evaluation of the interdisciplinary distribution of professional or research objects (RO), and the transdisciplinary effects of their changes. RO and professionals can be evaluated on the basis of keywords in relevant scientific papers, reports, surveys, proposals, CVs, and so on. The transdisciplinary effect is apparent when the interdisciplinarity distribution has been changed. We propose formulas to evaluate this transdisciplinary effect. This approach was implemented using participants in group projects at the fourth Young Scientists Conference (YSC)(dagger) on High-Performance Computing and Computer Simulation. The accuracy of the interdisciplinary vector of several participants was examined by the survey about their involvement in the team projects. This approach can be used to evaluate the compliance of a scientific team with the transdisciplinary research project (problem), as well as to assess the students' skills in transdisciplinary environments.