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A Practitioner's Guide to Cognitive Task
Analysis
Beth Crandall, Gary Klein and Robert R. Hoffman
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 Minds is 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 Minds
makes the methodology of CTA accessible and the skills involved
attainable.
Beth Crandall is Senior Technical Director of the Klein Associates
Division, Applied Research Associates.
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. |
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