Gary Klein and Cognitive Task Analysis
I'm just back from the Gary Klein masterclass on Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) for Expert Knowledge Transfer. CTA is an analysis of the cognitive skills needed to perform a task proficiently. Gary is a very smart person with many solid years of experience analyzing how firefighters, commandos, marines, etc. make decisions under pressure. His first book, Sources of Power, is filled with many stories of high pressure decision making. His second book, The Power of Intuition, expands on the first and offers concrete methods on how to prepare people for making high-pressure decisions. CTA has many different methods, but Gary mentioned 3 that he uses often: 1) Knowledge Audit, 2) Concept Mapping, and 3) Critical Decision Method. A knowledge audit is done to quickly identify the key cognitive elements of job; concept mapping is done to quickly identify the domain of the decision; and critical decision method is done to analyze decisions made during a critical incident. Now, I know that I am not giving you much detail here, but I did try to Google for some of Gary's papers and came up with something interesting, CTA for Instructional Designers [DOC]. This papers provides a nice overview of CTA and its different methods of elicitation. The reason I am attending this masterclass is because I feel that Gary's CTA methods can give me more ammunition to analyze and learn how people use intranets and websites. I will try to write a more detailed paper on this when I get the time!Permalink | Thursday, October 07, 2004
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