Engineering Education – Week 4.2 – Reading Notes

LOFT Process Guides: Understand Phase.

Techniques: Identify Problems, Preparation

Identify problems
- What problems should the learners be able to solve?
- Subject matter expert develops list of challenging tasks
- Steps:
  - Identify challenging tasks
    - Learning environment will help learner do something they couldn’t do before
  - Create problem typology
    - List all the problems learner must be able to tackle
    - Group problems into categories of similar knowledge and skills required
  - Describe the problem
    - Create problem statement
    - Describe how it sits in the typology
    - How is the problem solved
    - What skills does it require
    - Supporting materials

Presentation: Learning Module Design Understand Phase (benchmark tests and cognitive analysis)

Cognitive task analysis – what specifically should be learned
Workflow
- Identify experts
- Identify cognitively challenging tasks
- Gather data on how expert performs task
- Analyze data
- Represent it
Steps
- What are the project deliverables?
  - Identify what the stakeholders need (including the student of course)
- What is the task?
  - Create a focus statement
- What aspects of expertise do you need to know about?
  - How to identify expert performance?
- Documentation analysis (a.k.a. bootstrapping)
  - Come in with a schema
- Go or no go?
  - If documents describe it all, no need to do full CTA
- What situations will tell you the most about the issue?
- Identify experts
- Identify problems
- Choose CTA method
  - Concept mapping
    - Expert + facilitator + mapper
    - Node and link diagram to map out concepts and relationships
  - Verbal Protocol Analysis (VPA) / Talk-aloud problem solving (TAPS)
    - Talk while solving a problem
    - Code expert’s behavior: “verbal protocol”
  - Guided Experiential Learning (GEL) CTA
    - Interview one expert then validate with 2 other experts
  - Critical Decision Method (CDM)
    - Facilitator + note taker
    - Interview in 4 sweeps
      - Identify good incident story
      - Chronology of good decisions
      - Goals, expectations and cues in each decision
      - Errors novices might make
  - Percursor, Action, Result, Interpretation (PARI)
    - Avionics training environments
    - Experts are interview in pairs
      - One tries to solve the problem
      - Other expert runs the simulation
  - Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA)
    - Expert describes problem in 4-6 steps
    - Describe what is difficult in each task
    - Present expert with simulation and ask about:
      - Actions
      - Assessments
      - Critical cues
      - Erros
- Write your Preparation Report