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.

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.

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 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.