Developing and Recognizing Relative Expertise

• In Event: FUSE Studios: An Alternative Infrastructure for Learning in Schools

Abstract

Traditional methods of STEM education position the child as a novice learner and create few opportunities for children to demonstrate and constructively utilize their developing skills, related interests and capabilities, and perhaps even inadvertently suppress them (Stevens, 2000; Bevan, Bell, Stevens, & Razfar, 2012; NRC, 2009; Barron, 2006). Researchers have explored expertise in terms of domain mastery (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993), developed models for how novices become domain experts (Alexander, 2003; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986), and discussed pathways along which students move in developing science expertise (Schwarz et al., 2009; Alonzo & Gotwals, 2012; Shea & Duncan, 2013). Yet we have a limited understanding of young people’s developing STEM expertise in real time and know little about how others recognize and utilize the expertise of their peers (Bricker et al., 2008; Bell, Bricker, Lee, Reeve, & Zimmerman, 2006). This study examines the FUSE learning environment in order to expand our understanding of the development and acknowledgement of relative expertise among children by exploring how they become experts in a STEM learning context and how their expertise becomes valued.

Our data comes from two years of ethnographic observations and video recordings of fifth and sixth graders, who participated in FUSE for 90 minutes each week, throughout the 2013-14 school year. We continued following focal fifth graders in the 2014-15 school year as they entered sixth grade. We video recorded the whole classroom, took field notes, engaged in informal conversations as participant observers, and selected focal students to wear visors that recorded point-of-view video as they worked.

In this paper, we present two vignettes and additional shorter examples to show how students came to recognize and value their own and others’ developing expertise, welcoming opportunities to share that expertise with one another. Melissa, who began her fifth grade year asking adults for help, became a key resource for her classmates. By the end of sixth grade, classmates were seeking her technical, design, and content expertise on many challenges. Anika developed expertise specifically with the 3D printer, becoming the resident 3D printing expert in her classroom.

This free-choice environment allowed for numerous ways of participating and allowed information and expertise to accumulate and circulate for many challenges at once, distributing the number of potential classroom resources. In these classrooms, the FUSE website served as the content expert (traditionally the teacher’s role). Over time, this expertise dispersed throughout the students in the room. As the year progressed, students began to look to one another as reliable resources, creating an environment in which they could become known as relative experts. Children came to value their peers in their learning process. Interactions in which peers relied upon one another for their knowledge have been shown to increase self-esteem (Aronson & Patnoe, 1977/2011) and are important for developing a positive identity in regards to the subject matter (Cribbs, Hazari, Sonnert, & Sadler, 2015). Our analysis shows that when we design environments that give children the opportunity to develop and share expertise, they often take up that mantle and become empowered learners.

Authors

• Dionne N. Champion, Northwestern University

• Lauren Penney, Northwestern University