Cognitive task analysis involves identifying the components of a task that are required for adequate performance. It is thus an important step in ITS design because it circumscribes the curriculum to be taught and provides a decomposition of that curriculum into the knowledge and subskills students must learn. This paper describes several different kinds of cognitive task analysis and organizes them according to a taxonomy of theroretical/empirical prescriptive/descriptive approaches. Examples are drawn from the analysis of a particular statistical reasoning task. The discussion centers on how different approaches to task analysis provide different prespectives on the decomposition of a complex skill and compares these approaches to more traditional methods.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education