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Cognitive Task Analysis

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is a protocol utilizing interviews, observations, and other knowledge elicitation techniques to determine the explicit and implicit knowledge experts use to solve problems or perform complex tasks within their respective domains. CTA attempts to determine the sequence of actions, decisions, classifications, and strategies that enable experts to perform complex tasks with speed and accuracy. By identifying relevant information that may not be captured through other mechanisms, CTA can provide extensive information often used to develop instructional materials, decision support systems, and cognitive ergonomics. This entry discusses the history and varieties of CTA and components of CTA implementation. It then describes instructional design systems using CTA before discussing research evidence on the effectiveness of CTA and CTA-based training.

History of CTA

Task analysis is a general term that describes the process of determining the steps and procedures for task performance or problem solving. Early innovators of task analysis, such as Frederick W. Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, utilized behavioral task analysis, which primarily addressed the observable, physical aspects of tasks. As work tasks transitioned from primarily physical labor to thought-based problem solving, different processes were required for discerning the necessary steps to capture performance because key aspects of those processes were not visible to observers. Classification tasks and those requiring dynamic adaptation to changes in circumstances could not be fully analyzed attending only to visible behaviors. Therefore, attention in the task analysis community shifted to incorporating both the physical and the cognitive aspects of performance, resulting in a rapidly growing interest in CTA.

Although utilized as a basis for training since the 1980s, CTA has not enjoyed widespread use due to the costs associated with its implementation compared to other approaches to identifying and selecting content to include in training. Conducting CTA requires skilled analysts and is often time consuming for both analysts and the experts from whom they elicit knowledge. Because experts’ time is both expensive and typically in high demand, managers or developers may be reluctant to take on the cost burden. In 1992. the U.S. Department of Labor considered using CTA to update the descriptions of over 20,000 jobs listed in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, but a panel convened by the American Psychological Association concluded that the costs would be prohibitive. However, cost-benefit analyses by Richard E. Clark and others suggest that CTA is cost effective when used to develop training deployed at scale within an organization. Despite an upfront cost greater than that of training development based on behavioral task analyses or other means of identifying instructional content, CTA-based training is generally more efficient in its use of training time and its level of effectiveness. These benefits translate into greater cost savings in terms of fewer hours or days of work missed by employees for participation in training, lower training implementation costs, and higher levels of employee performance (i.e., fewer errors) after training.

Varieties of CTA

The literature has identified and reported the use of well over 100 different types of CTA. While this number is large, most techniques fall into four

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