Psychology Commons^™

A Cognitively-Oriented Approach To Task Analysis And Test Development, David A. Dubois, Valerie L. Shalin, Keith R. Levi, Walter C. Borman

Psychology Faculty Publications

Clear descriptions of job expertise are required to support applications and improvements in personnel training and job performance. This report describes a practical approach to task analysis that integrates the issues, content, and methods of cognitive science and personnel psychology. Cognitively oriented task analysis employs a breadth, then depth, strategy for identifying job expertise. Starting with a task-by-knowledge framework, job expertise is successively elaborated using interviews, expert ratings, and protocol analyses. The application of task analysis results to the development of written performance measures is described to illustrate the contributions of this approach to measurement validity. Task analysis results show …