Stephen "Steve" Martin Fiore - US grants

The "Florida Alliance for the Study of Expertise" (FASE) is designed to advance a science of Expertise Studies throughout the United States and throughout the world. FASE leverages the capabilities of world leaders in the study of expertise who are affiliated with Florida Universities with the overarching goal of understanding the nature and development of expertise. This funding will support the creation of a technical and collaborative infrastructure that will unite a multi-university and multi-disciplinary research partnership for the purposes of understanding and encouraging the scientific study of expertise. To understand learning at a fundamental level one must examine learning phenomena up to the level of expert achievement and theories of learning must take such phenomena into account. To address this need, FASE will integrate differing scientific methodologies to enhance the necessary complementarity of laboratory and field research. FASE will support collaboration across universities and across methodologies with the goal of fostering a synergistic combination of methods where the benefits of scientific approaches can be leveraged to improve hypothesis generation and testing along with theory development in a broader context. FASE focuses on the entire human system and how experience alters this system to produce meaningful learning that leads to the highest levels of achievement. FASE will facilitate the understanding of how it is that expert knowledge is acquired in order to determine both how it can be preserved and how others may be taught to engage in the requisite activities to similarly acquire such knowledge.

FASE contributes to the goals of developing a science of learning by connecting learning research to scientific challenges and developing research communities that can capitalize on new opportunities. Further, the cross-section of scientific experience within this alliance allows FASE to address fundamental questions in learning by focusing on the physical, mental, and organizational capabilities associated with exceptional performance. As such, FASE is designed to benefit not only K-12 educational settings, but also workforce development for adult learning in government and industry. FASE is designed to support, not only basic science on how the human system achieves levels of exceptional performance, but also a unique cooperation between science and practice in order to ensure the rapid transition of new knowledge to education, industry, and to government. Last, FASE broadens the participation of underrepresented groups first, by establishing an association with Florida International University, an official minority-serving university so as to develop the capacity to support research and education for minority populations in science. Second, FASE develops the general educational infrastructure to support Webcasts and other distributable media for courses that can be offered for broad dissemination. In short, FASE will significantly contribute to national needs by elucidating how it is that experts achieve exceptional levels of performance while at the same time pursuing this on a pedagogical level.

There is little doubt that new and emerging technologies will have an impact on how instructional systems are developed and deployed over the next several decades. However, without the necessary scientific base to inform design, sizeable investments will be made into learning systems that are ineffective, or at best, not optimal. The long-term vision of this catalyst project is to extend fundamental understanding of the learning process as a basis for optimizing the use of technology in learning. The overarching goal is to explore how emerging technologies can be better designed to support learning by augmenting, replacing, creating and/or managing a learner's actual experience with the world. Hence the aim is to study synthetic experience as a means to enhance learning and performance. The term synthetic learning environments (SLEs) is being used to describe such systems; this research will generate knowledge that leads to their optimization in both design and implementation. This effort will demonstrate and extend the value of a unique collaboration between education and entertainment as a means to generate innovative teaching approaches and methods for enhancing the learning process.

Many theories of learning and development of expertise have at their core the notion that people use their experience is the basis for learning, particularly in complex, high-performance tasks. Technology has advanced to the point where it is possible to augment, create, replace, enrich and accelerate this natural process of gaining experience (and hence learning) through creation of SLEs. However, in order to make full use of these opportunities, basic research is needed to better understand the nature of synthetic experience -- that is, experience that is deliberately created with hardware and software. Moreover, a host of learning environment features must also be investigated to determine how they are best incorporated into SLEs. The current effort will address these questions by synthesizing past work; creating a conceptual framework for studying synthetic experience; delineating a long-term, prioritized research agenda; and conducting a prototype experiment.

Understanding the psychological consequences of computer-generated synthetic experiences -- specifically, how engaging, believable, realistic, potent, and meaningful they can be -- has enormous potential to effect many aspects of society. For example, if synthetic experiences are processed similarly to actual ones, then there is potential to substitute synthetic experience for actual experience in education and training systems; personalized, interactive entertainment; workforce selection, certification and testing; and perhaps even situations such as counseling and psychotherapy. In addition, this technology has the potential to make learning resources much more accessible (e.g., to underrepresented groups), to individualize them so that traditional barriers to learning for many students can be removed, and to create experiences that many learners would typically be unable to access. The proposed research will lay the groundwork for development of guidelines and tools that will make technology-enabled learning systems widely available and cost effective to develop for use by all learners.

One the deepest mysteries of life is consciousness. Most people take for granted the fact that they are aware, that their waking experiences are framed by the construct of a "self" identity that remains consistent throughout life. But what are the physical, psychological, and cultural bases of consciousness? Some researchers believe that this construct is ultimately subjective, which means that it cannot be directly observed or measured. Some believe that consciousness can nonetheless be studied by indirect observation, while others have argued that the quality of subjective experience can never be studied by the scientific method.

With support of the National Science Foundation, Drs. Jack, Gallagher, and Raichle will join an international team of psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and neuroscientists to investigate the empirical bases of consciousness. They will examine whether evidence for different conceptualizations of the self can be found in patterns of brain activity, and if so, whether their neuroscientific findings can help to further refine and expand our understanding of consciousness. Their work is focused on how the representation of self differs as a function of social and environmental contexts.

Our research effort has two overarching goals: the first epistemological and the second methodological. Our epistemological goal concerns naturalistic decision making (NDM) in the context of complex domains. Our application is an important economic problem where the evaluation of the social welfare consequences often leads to conflicting positions by experts and affected non-expert citizens. We argue that much of this conflict is created because experts and non-experts use different cognitive processes when evaluating and forming decisions. We propose a simulation technique designed to facilitate a convergence in these cognitive processes, and hypothesize that this will lead to a reduction in the degree of conflict. We have two methodological goals. First, we will use interactive, immersive virtual-reality (VR) simulation technologies to recreate, in a controlled environment, the rich array of cues and information relied upon by decision-makers in naturalistic domains. The application we have selected, forest management policies, is a good example of a decision environment with a rich set of information cues and interactions, and where the experience of experts is expected to matter in significant ways to the decisions made. Our second methodological goal is to blend the techniques of controlled economics experimentation with those of NDM. The power of experimentation lies in replicability and control, and by extending these capabilities through the power of VR simulations, this research will allow us to explore issues in decision making in ways heretofore not feasible. We will compare decisions made by participants using standard state-of-the-art questionnaires, where scenarios are described in words and with pictures, to those made using the interactive experience of the VR technology. We hypothesize that the differences in values and decisions between experts and non-experts is smaller with the immersive, interactive VR environment than with the standard word and picture descriptions.

The research proposed will be valuable within economics, psychology, and computer science. Within economics, the research will contribute to the extension of standard expected utility theory to include the role of context and familiarity. Within the psychological sciences, this research presents a unique opportunity for theory development and testing in naturalistic domains. The advances in computer science will be in the development of algorithms for real-time, realistic rendering and the integration of these in a comprehensive mixed reality system.

Scientific communities continually struggle to overcoming the challenges arising from interdisciplinary interaction. At this time, interdisciplinarity is at an important juncture: scientists and funding agencies are recognizing and promoting more interdisciplinary collaboration; technologies are enabling far greater and dispersed interdisciplinary interactions; and many are convinced that interdisciplinarity is a key to scientific breakthroughs in a number of arenas. This workshop will provide a forum for discussion of interdisciplinary research in the context of team science.

Beginning from what is known from research on teams of all sorts, the workshop will lay the foundation for exploring the team-based processes required for innovative solutions to highly complex scientific problems that cross disciplinary boundaries. The outcomes will include an assessment of the current state of the art for team science and assessments about what are the most promising and important directions for social scientists to pursue in order to advance the state of the art. Further, the products of the workshop will be useful to those who currently seek to mine social science knowledge in order to practice evidence-based management of team science.

The question of shared leadership is growing more important as complex world issues increasingly require distributed collaboration. Organizational researchers lack an understanding of the multiple kinds of leadership roles that virtual teams rely on and of the optimal balance of these roles. Previous research has confounded virtuality and distribution or included only a few combinations of these characteristics.
Systematically examining the combined effects of degree of virtuality and geographical distribution on emerging forms of leadership and outcomes, this research includes a lab study to understand leadership structure in virtual teams. It investigates how team cognitive processes and performance are affected by: (1) how leadership is shared or distributed among internal and external team members, (2) the degree of virtuality inherent in the tools used for collaboration (e.g. synchronicity, informational value), and (3) the degree of distribution among team members (e.g. fully distributed, partially distributed). Results will extend existing theory on shared leadership and team cognition to hybrid teams of virtual and face-to-face interactions to illuminate the relationship between leader behaviors and team outcomes.

These findings will ultimately provide evidence-based guidelines for practitioners regarding the form(s) of leadership best suited for particular types of virtual teams and the corresponding processes required for effective performance. Additionally, findings will contribute to knowledge concerning how virtual team structure interacts with computer and communication support technology to impact team process and performance with potentially transformative results.

This award is for a workshop to take place just prior to the Science of Team Science annual meeting in 2015. The workshop, led by a team from the University of Central Florida, is to serve as a high-level review of the state of this interdisciplinary area of study. A synthesis of the field especially important given the advances currently being made. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is both an advantage and a challenge, for work is currently being conducted in a range of different literatures. The workshop will provide a means by which researchers can get a better, more nuanced sense of other literatures, methods, and findings. This is especially important when the attendees are drawn from so many different research traditions and cannot be expect to be familiar with all of the work that is relevant to their questions.

The workshop is organized around a series of panel discussions, presentations by major figures in the field, and discussions of current and future topics for research of importance to the nation. The workshop should have a broader impact even beyond attendees, for the workshop itself could serve as a template for future interdisciplinary meetings. Finally, as part of the workshop, the organizers will pull together a reading list of seminal findings on the topic as well as sample syllabi for undergraduate and graduate courses on the topic from a range of orientations.

This project explores one of the NSF Idea Machine Winning Entries: "Reinventing Scientific Talent." While much has been written about the challenges of the kind of interdisciplinarity present in convergence research, a thorough understanding of the knowledge, skill, and attitude competencies associated with scientific teamwork is still needed. The goal of the project is to develop a better understanding of team science competencies contributing to effective convergence science. (Team science is a collaborative effort to address a scientific challenge that leverages the strengths and expertise of professionals trained in different fields.) The project will address these gaps through an integrated set of activities that survey scholars and practitioners to examine similarities and differences in these perceptions across disciplines and experience levels. Complementing these are in-depth workshops where stakeholders provide their insights so that a richer understanding is gained. From this, a more comprehensive framework of science team competencies can be developed to inform how to reinvent scientific talent and to suggest future directions for the research of team science. Outcomes from this research will help extend the nation?s scientific capabilities by teaching scientists how to better engage in ?reciprocal learning?, that is, how to leverage their expertise and share their knowledge to nurture a stronger foundation for successful convergence research.

This project centers on understanding interdisciplinary team science competencies in relation to levels of experience and types of disciplinary expertise. Although research is beginning to examine some of these issues, no studies have simultaneously examined the relation between perceptions of team science competencies, how they contribute to team effectiveness, and how scientists learn while engaged in collaborations. The project will examine interdisciplinary clusters of researchers, each addressing their own form of convergence science. It will explore perceptions of team science competencies, how they are best acquired, and how to create learning cultures capable of supporting the development of the teamwork skills foundational to convergence and generalizable across problem domains. Through workshops held with these clusters, and surveys of scholars and practitioners affiliated with team science projects, the project will develop research findings and a framework representing the varied nature of convergence competencies and how these relate to learning while engaged in scientific collaborations. The project?s complementary research tasks will provide the foundation for identifying the competencies associated with team science effectiveness, and how these contribute to reciprocal learning while engaged in scientific collaborations. The project will disseminate a report presenting findings and research recommendations through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at professional conferences, and additional outreach.

This project is supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning Program (AISL) in the Division of Research on Learning and the NSF 2026 Fund Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This project is funded through the NSF Directorate for Engineering Germination program, which seeks to foster the development of pedagogical approaches to increase the ability of academic researchers to formulate research questions and ideas with potentially transformative outcomes. Major societal challenges can benefit from large, coordinated solutions that leverage interdisciplinary teams with collaborations from academia, government, industry, and other stakeholders. However, many college and university faculty have limited experience, tools, and support to successfully engage in diverse teams that extend beyond their department, much less their institution. The goal of this project is to create and sustain inter-institutional teams composed of junior and senior faculty members with diverse STEM perspectives and methodologies focusing on pressing regional issues such as coastal challenges. This statewide research intervention project will be developed and supported by research development professionals embedded in higher education institutions across Florida. Broader impacts will accrue from instantiation of interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research teams who develop research projects capable of successfully addressing societal challenges. Success in this project will provide a template for replication and scaling by states and other sizable networks focused on addressing intractable problems with team-based solutions that cross disciplinary boundaries.

This project directly addresses gaps in researcher professional development, networking, and support by creating and guiding inter-institutional teams formed around important societal needs and informed by key community stakeholders. It involves a two-stage research intervention that commences with a collaborative learning and ideation event and continues with supported team and project development. The facilitators of these activities will be Research Development (RD) staff from Florida colleges and universities, under the guidance of a faculty expert in team science. These RD professionals are members of FloRDA, a statewide network of research staff from a diverse set of 21 member institutions, including primarily undergraduate and minority-serving institutions. During this program, RD professionals will serve as the “glue” to form and facilitate faculty teams, as connective boundary spanners with institutional knowledge as well as broader knowledge encompassing opportunities for strategic growth, existing community partnerships, and statewide policy and funding initiatives. These facilitators will nurture newly formed research teams into stable groups with aligned goals and defined member roles, leveraging activities designed to enhance knowledge integration and create a shared transdisciplinary framework. Success in this project may enhance understanding of how to implement team science approaches in geographically dispersed groups. It will also be important for charting a path through which RD professionals can foster and support team science spanning multiple and diverse partner organizations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.