How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 125

How to Teach the Twelve Cognitive Processes 125 itself, is the knowledge that underlies the hypothesis and understand- ing what constitutes evidence and the consequences of evidence. This knowledge is very domain specific and is the reason that doctors don’t necessarily make good car mechanics, and vice versa. This knowledge can be acquired only through practice and experience and can be ac- quired only consciously. Diagnosis is thus a conscious process that is very knowledge dependent. There is no seat-of-the-pants diagnosis, namely, diagnosis that is seemingly subconscious, although it may well seem that way. Having an intuition is usually just the result of having a great deal of experience, so much so that hypotheses just jump out at you because similar cases are so easily recognizable to an expert. Someone who is good at diagnosis would be good at diagnosis in any domain of knowledge if they knew how to gather and interpret evidence in that domain. Diagnosis is clearly very difficult to learn. Most people are rather bad at it outside of their own areas of interest. Even inside their knowl- edge base they can be sloppy in the reasoning and leap to wrong con- clusions. This is true of all analytic skills. It is possible to never learn to do them well. HOW TO TEACH PLANNING Planning is extremely important and typical of an analytic cognitive process; it is something that some people simply never learn to do well. Teaching planning must be focused around the assembly of a case base. Planning is taught in many domains of knowledge and is almost always taught wrong. The classic error is to teach the theory of planning, means-ends analysis, a theory of urban planning, spatial planning, military planning, and logic-based artificial intelligence planning. Such courses all make the same mistake. Course designers think people use theories when, in fact, when people plan, they sim- ply try to adapt old plans that have worked before to new situations. Often people don’t plan at all. They simply assume that a set of ac- tions they intend to perform will work to achieve an expected goal. Teaching planning is therefore a tedious process that is best begun in childhood. It involves making plans, seeing how they play out, and performing an analysis of what went wrong. Often people are not even aware that they have made a plan, and are simply frustrated when things go wrong. They almost never perform an after-action HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023871