Training Critical Thinking Skills for Battlefield Situation Assessment: An Experimental Test.

Abstract : In battlefield situation assessment, officers must interpret information that is incomplete, unreliable, and often conflicting and gather new information to improve their assessments and plans. In previous work, a framework for these cognitive activities was developed based on interviews with activity-duty command staff, and a training method was developed. That training helped officers to find and assess the reliability of hidden assumptions and to resolve conflicting evidence. Forty-three U.S. Army officers participated in an experimental training study with scenario-based tests. Trained officers generated more accurate arguments concerning a given assessment than did controls. Improvements in quality were related to the increased relevance of their judgments. In some problems, training countered a tendency to change hypotheses too readily; in other problems, training countered a tendency to hold on to a hypothesis too long. Training did not decrease confidence in evaluations, nor did it hypersensitize officers to information.