Working Minds A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis

by Crandall, Beth; Klein, Gary A.; Hoffman, Robert R.

• ISBN13: 9780262532815
• ISBN10: 0262532816
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-07-07
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) helps researchers understand how cognitive skills and strategies make it possible for people to act effectively and get things done. CTA can yield information people need-employers faced with personnel issues, market researchers who want to understand the thought processes of consumers, trainers and others who design instructional systems, health care professionals who want to apply lessons learned from errors and accidents, systems analysts developing user specifications, and many other professionals. CTA can show what makes the workplace work-and what keeps it from working as well as it might. Working Mindsis a true handbook, offering a set of tools for doing CTA: methods for collecting data about cognitive processes and events, analyzing them, and communicating them effectively. It covers both the "why" and the "how" of CTA methods, providing examples, guidance, and stories from the authors' own experiences as CTA practitioners. Because effective use of CTA depends on some conceptual grounding in cognitive theory and research-on knowing what a cognitive perspective can offer-the book also offers an overview of current research on cognition. The book provides detailed guidance for planning and carrying out CTA, with chapters on capturing knowledge and capturing the way people reason. It discusses studying cognition in real-world settings and the challenges of rapidly changing technology. And it describes key issues in applying CTA findings in a variety of fields. Working Mindsmakes the methodology of CTA accessible and the skills involved attainable.

Author Biography

Beth Crandall is Senior Technical Director Gary Klein is Chief Scientist of the Klein Associates Division, Applied Research Associates Robert R. Hoffman is Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
1 Introduction	1	(8)
2 Overview of Cognitive Task Analysis Methods	9	(18)
I Tools for Exploring Cognition in Context	27	(102)
3 Preparation and Framing	29	(12)
4 Using Concept Maps for Knowledge Elicitation and Representation	41	(28)
5 Incident-Based CTA: Helping Practitioners "Tell Stories"	69	(22)
6 CTA Methods and Experiment-Like Tasks	91	(16)
7 Analysis and Representation	107	(22)
II Finding Cognition	129	(42)
8 Thinking About Cognition	131	(18)
9 Trends and Themes in the Development of Cognitive Task Analysis: The Rise of Modern Cognitive Psychology	149	(10)
10 Information Technology	159	(12)
III Putting CTA Findings to Use	171	(88)
11 The Role of Cognitive Requirements in System Development	173	(22)
12 Cognitive Training	195	(20)
13 Understanding How Consumers Make Decisions: Using Cognitive Task Analysis for Market Research	215	(14)
14 Cognitive Task Analysis for Measurement and Evaluation	229	(16)
15 Future Directions for Cognitive Task Analysis	245	(14)
Appendix: Guidance for Data Collection	259	(24)
Notes	283	(4)
References	287	(28)
Index	315