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

CHAPTER SEVEN
includes the ability to devise plans and actions that differ from and
improve upon “school solutions.” Capabilities that widen the range of
options can be taught, but higher levels of creativity are more likely to be
inborn than trained.
The above review suggests, first, that the creative processes needed by analysts
can, to some extent, be broken down into components, and second, that
these components can, again to some extent, be taught. Instructional technology
can now substantially aid analysts in acquiring the facts, concepts, and
procedures needed to perform their craft. However, it must become increasingly
“intelligent” if it is to compress the years of experience analysts now
need to become proficient and help them more rapidly acquire the advanced
cognitive capabilities—those higher in Bloom’s hierarchy—that they also
need. To do this successfully, instruction must be tailored to the specific background,
abilities, goals, and interests of the individual student or user. Instructional
technology must provide what has been called “articulate expertise.”
Not only must it supply helpful and relevant guidance in these more advanced
levels of knowledge, skills, and abilities, it must do so in a way that learners
and users with varying levels of knowledge and skill can understand.
Discussion
At this point, it may be worth reviewing the capabilities provided by “nonintelligent”
instructional technology since the 1950s. It has been able to: 32
• accommodate the rate of progress of individual students, allowing as
much or as little time as each needs to reach instructional objectives;
• tailor both the content and the sequence of instructional content to each
student’s needs; 33
• make the instruction easy or difficult, specific or abstract, applied or theoretical
as necessary;
• adjust to students’ most efficient learning styles (collaborative or individual,
verbal or visual, etc.).
Intelligent tutoring systems are a different matter. They require quite specific
capabilities that were first targeted in the 1960s. 34 Two key capabilities
are that intelligent tutoring systems must:
32
E. Galanter, Automatic Teaching; R. C. Atkinson and H. A. Wilson, Computer-Assisted
Instruction; P. Suppes and M. Morningstar, Computer-assisted Instruction at Stanford 1966-68; J.
D. Fletcher and M. R. Rockway, “Computer-based Training in the Military.”
33
J. S. Brown, R. R. Burton, and J. DeKleer, “Pedagogical, Natural Language and Knowledge
Engineering in SOPHIE I, II, and III.”
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