Collaborative Research: Developing Strategies for Effective, Interdisciplinary, and Collaborative Field Geoscience Research with Novice to Expert Teams

This project will study effective practices for building strong, successful research teams. Researchers will study a group of field geoscientists working together on the Subduction Zones in Four Dimensions (SZ4D) initiative, which consists of a group of scientists who are working to better understand and forecast natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis that occur where Earth’s tectonic plates meet.

This project will analyze surveys, observations, and group interviews to learn how coordination, mentoring, communication, and shared leadership help everyone, from beginners to experts, work and learn together successfully. It is expected that this work will be applicable to a broad community of field scientists, who will be able to incorporate the findings from this study into their work to make future field projects and other team-based science projects stronger and more impactful.

Large-scale, interdisciplinary field geoscience research is necessary to understand the complex mechanisms that lead to subduction zone geohazards and how best to reduce their impacts. However, prior geoscience field research initiatives to accomplish similar goals are usually an amalgamation of single PI-led research projects, which have so far achieved neither the envisioned scale nor holistic integration of field-based geologic data into community projects proposed by the Subduction Zones in Four Dimensions (SZ4D) initiative.

This team proposes to use the community of practice (CoP) framework where groups of people that share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting in an ongoing basis, to study collaboration and learning during a field data collection activity as part of an 8-day field deployment involving many scientists representing different sub-disciplines and levels of expertise. The extant literature on field learning and research suggests that fieldwork is an important component for building effective CoPs, promotes the application of theoretical knowledge, and helps novice learners build community identity.

However, employing the CoP framework to empirically identify best-practices and necessary skills to ensure effective participation to promote success among interdisciplinary teams to achieve common research goals has not been attempted before. Addressing this broad question is beyond the scope of a single research project. Therefore, researchers will begin by collecting empirical baseline data to demonstrate how interdisciplinary field-based CoPs develop during fieldwork and document the effectiveness of the CoP framework in promoting successful interdisciplinary research goals.

The proposed work will use mixed-methods involving a combination of observations, focus group interviews, and surveys (pre-and-post) to evaluate how fieldwork fosters the development of CoPs, and how four elements of the CoP framework including coordination (hierarchical vs whole group), communication (visual, written, verbal, online, in person), mentoring, and shared leadership (differences between novice and expert decision making) influence the effectiveness of interdisciplinary learning environments across the novice to expert spectrum.

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.