This article outlines two general challenges associated with the institutionalization of cognitive readiness: (1) the training and education community must recognize that the institutionalization of higher-order cognitive skills development is fundamentally newâ€”not merely a slight deviation from the status quo, and (2) commonly discussed cognitive competencies must be better operationalized for instruction and measurement purposes.

First, the authors consider the phenomenon of "new vs. news," originally conceived by Dr. Alan Kay and presented at last year's I/ITSEC conference. This metaphor helps to explain, in part, how and why certain industries are slow to adapt to innovative change despite awareness of it. In this case, introduction of foundational (new) cognitive readiness requirements for competencies like "sensemaking" and "metacognition" can be misperceived as simply additive (news) to existing training, and therefore dismissed as mere expansion of more commonly understood concepts, such as situation awareness or critical thinking. The authors explain how cognitive competencies are distinct and can be integrated with established training to adequately support the institutionalization of cognitive readiness. Second, the authors articulate a Cognitive Skill-Stance (CSS) Hierarchy that presents a "new" way to express both currently established and emerging cognitive training recommendations. The CSS Hierarchy helps depict the conceptual transformation of cognitive competencies across levels of aggregation and abstraction: from the less tangible stances to the more concrete procedural abilities. Thus, the CSS Hierarchy helps describe both analysis and intuition, both "analytic" and "intuitive" cognition. The CSS Hierarchy also supports advanced education and training by offering a discrete framework with which to show interrelationships among the major facets of a domain and help personnel develop an "embodied understanding of practice" (i.e., to understand how idiosyncratic high-level objectives guide behaviors in practice).

By use of this framework, we believe a clearer operational understanding of cognitive readiness training can be attained, and, in turn, this will support efforts to institutionalize cognitive readiness across the Services to enhance performance.

Kendy Vierling

Affiliation

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The Cognitive Skillâ€”Stance Hierarchy: A "New" Training Framework

Implementing Change for Greater Learning, Readiness, and Lethality