Understanding the Science of Team Science to Improve Research Collaboration
Steve Fiore, Central Florida University
Academia has long recognized the challenges associated with interdisciplinary research – from the tacit norms associated with the discipline bound university department to the difficulty inherent in communicating and collaborating across disciplines. Despite this fact, we have continually struggled with overcoming the challenges arising from interdisciplinary interaction. This is a particularly complex form of collaborative cognition where knowledge from varied fields needs to elicited and integrated. In this talk he will first discuss interdisciplinary research in the context of team science, focusing on the developing field of the science of team science. This area of inquiry is designed to support a broad swath of team researchers such that we can examine basic and applied scientific issues of tremendous societal importance. Second, he will provide detail on specific challenges faced by researchers working in teams (e.g., conflict) and how these can be better understood and addressed. His goal is provide macro and micro level perspectives on collaboration and teamwork and show how a multidisciplinary approach to theory and practice can contribute to understanding and improving solving important scientific and societal problems.
- Dr. Stephen M. Fiore is Director, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, and Professor with the University of Central Florida’s Cognitive Sciences Program in the Department of Philosophy and Institute for Simulation & Training. He maintains a multidisciplinary research interest that incorporates aspects of the cognitive, social, organizational, and computational sciences in the investigation of learning and performance in individuals and teams. His primary area of research is the interdisciplinary study of complex collaborative cognition and the understanding of how humans interact socially and with technology. Dr. Fiore is a founding conference committee member for the Science of Team Science annual conference, and a founding board member and past-president of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research. He has been a visiting scholar for the study of shared and extended cognition at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in Lyon, France (2010) and he was a member of the expert panel for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which focused on collaborative problem-solving skills. He has contributed to working groups for the National Academies of Sciences in understanding and measuring “21st Century Skills” and was a committee member of their “Science of Team Science” consensus study, as well as a member of the National Assessment of Educational Progress report Collaborative Problem Solving. As Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator he has helped to secure and manage approximately $25 million in research funding. He is co-author of a book on “Accelerating Expertise” (2013) and is a co-editor of volumes on Shared Cognition (2012), Macrocognition in Teams (2008), Distributed Training (2007), and Team Cognition (2004). Dr. Fiore has also co-authored over 200 scholarly publications in the area of learning, memory, and problem solving on individuals and groups.
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