Developing cognitive task analysis and the importance of socio-cognitive competence/insight for professional practice

Julie Gore,Adrian P Banks,Almuth Mcdowall

doi:10.1007/s10111-018-0502-2

Abstract

Accelerating the cognitive expertise of professionals is a critical challenge for many organizations. This paper reports a collaborative, longitudinal, academic practitioner project which aimed to elicit, document, and accelerate the cognitive expertise of engineering professionals working with the manufacture and management of petroleum additives. Twenty-five engineering experts were trained by three academic psychologists to use applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA) interview techniques to document the cognition of their expert peers. Results had high face validity for practitioners who elicited hot/sensory-based cognition, a number of perceptual skills and mental models, highlighting undocumented context specific expertise. We conclude from a peer review of findings, combined with experienced CTA analysts that ACTA techniques can be advanced in context by the explicit recognition and development of socio-cognitive competence/insight.

Highlights

Accelerating learning by capturing, documenting, and utilising professional cognitive expertise where technological excellence is fundamental to success is a critical challenge for many high-reliability, global organizations
Whilst much of the work completed in judgment and decision-making has a history of examining the cognitive errors associated with decision-making (Kahneman et al 1982), the theoretical origins of the decision-making perspective adopted in this study focus on real-world decisionmaking, i.e., naturalistic decision-making (NDM) (Klein et al 1993)
The study demonstrates the utility of applying applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA) to the domain of utilities management and engineering in a macrocognitive framework through the elicitation of scenarios to assist novice engineering professionals

Summary

Introduction

Accelerating learning by capturing, documenting, and utilising professional cognitive expertise where technological excellence is fundamental to success is a critical challenge for many high-reliability, global organizations. The naturalistic decision-making (NDM) community has reported the advantages of applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA) and associated cognitive task analysis (CTA) techniques (Hoffman and Militello 2008; Roth 2008; Militello et al 2010) for capturing and developing our insight of cognition. These techniques have begun to steadily grow in other research areas of organizational behaviour and management practice (Gore and Ward 2017; Gore and McAndrew 2009; McAndrew and Gore 2012, 2013; Gore et al 2015a, b, c; Osland 2010; Osland et al 2013). We aimed to ensure that aspects of cognitive expertise that are difficult to articulate are documented with clear application validity

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