Trialling the SMART Approach: Identifying and Assessing Sense-making

It is important to develop tools that support sense-making by providing representations that help to capture the externalisation of the thinking process. The paper focuses on a new method for identifying the sense-making processes of experts by combing probes with cognitive task analysis methods. The data-frame sense-making model is used as a theoretical frame, and the probes have been developed around the model to elicit experts’ sense-making. However, in the analysis proceeding a sense-making task, the developed probes by themselves were unable to capture the experts sense-making and a stronger emphasis of cognitive task analysis methods and observations were required to interpret the findings.