Formative Research on the Heuristic Task Analysis Process

Corporate and educational settings increasingly address more decision-making, problem-solving and other complex cognitive skills to handle complex cognitive, or heuristic, tasks, but the ever-increasing needfor heuristic knowledge has outpaced the refinement of task analysis methodsfor heuristic expertise. Utilizing the Heuristic Task Analysis (HTA) process, a method developedfor eliciting, analyzing, and representing expertise in complex cognitive tasks, aformative research study was conducted on the task of group cotunseling to further improve the-HTA process. Implications of thefindings include the needfor incorporating various interview strategies and techniques, developing strategies for working with multiple experts, and considering the level of task expertise of the analyst. A revised version of the HTA process is presented based on these implications. [1 As our society in general and the workplace in particular become more complex, we are finding that a greater number of the activities that people undertake are relatively more complex cognitive tasks than ever before. Whether in K12 education, higher education, corporate training, or any other context, to help people learn the heuristic (complex cognitive) elements of an expert's know-how, we must be able to identify thoseheuristics.