Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY
enhance the former. Instruction in developing mental abstractions will
enhance the latter.
• Metacognition—the executive functions of thought, more specifically,
those needed to monitor, assess, and regulate one’s own cognitive processes.
25 Meta-cognitive skills can be enhanced by exercises designed to
increase awareness of self-regulatory processes. 26
• Pattern Recognition—the ability to distinguish the familiar from the unfamiliar.
It may be accomplished by “template matching,” which involves
comparing retained images with incoming sensory impressions; or by
“feature comparison,” which involves recognizing and generalizing from
distinctive features of a structure held in memory with incoming sensory
impressions. 27 Pattern recognition can be taught through a combination of
extensive practice, with feedback, and instruction in forming abstractions.
• Automaticity—processes that require only limited conscious attention. 28
Automaticity can be taught by providing extensive practice, with feedback.
• Problem Solving—the ability to analyze a situation and identify a goal or
goals that flow from it, identify tasks and subtasks leading to the goal,
develop a plan to achieve them, and apply the resources needed to carry out
the plan. Practice, with feedback, and overlearning can enhance problemsolving
ability in many tasks. Techniques for problem solving can be successfully
taught, as can the knowledge base needed to implement them. 29
• Decisionmaking—a component of problem solving, but the emphasis in
decisionmaking is on recognizing learned patterns, reviewing courses of
action, assessing their impact, selecting one, and allocating resources to
it. 30 Instruction in assessing courses of action has been shown to improve
decisionmaking, but some aspects of successful decisionmaking are more
likely to be inborn than trained.
• Mental Flexibility and Creativity—the ability to generate and modify
courses of action rapidly in response to changing circumstances. 31 It
24
G. Salomon and D. N. Perkins “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanisms of a
Neglected Phenomenon.”
25
J. H. Flavell, “Metacognitive Aspects of Problem Solving.”
26
D. J. Hacker, Metacognition: Definitions and Empirical Foundations [On-line Report].
27
M. H. Ashcraft, Fundamentals of Cognition.
28
R. M. Shiffrin and W. Schneider, W. “Controlled and Automatic Human Information Processing:
II. Perceptual Learning.”
29
J. R. Hayes, The Complete Problem Solver.
30
P. Slovic, S. Lichtenstein, and B. Fischoff, “Decision-making.”
31
D. Klahr, & H. A. Simon, “What Have Psychologists (and Others) Discovered About the Process
of Scientific Discovery?”
93