Assessing cognitive skill: Multiple measures of learning outcomes

Recently, researchers have hypothesized that humans interact effectively with their environment by organizing knowledge into meaningful patterns that are stored in memory. The term "mental model" is often used to refer to this knowledge organization (Gentner & Stevens, 1983). Moreover, it has been argued that knowledge can be differentiated into declarative, procedural, and strategic knowledge (Converse & Kahler, 1992; Stout, Cannon-Bowers, & Salas, 1994), all of which are hypothesized to af€ect performance. The current investigation examined the extent to which two of these knowledge typesdeclarative and procedural-contributed to the acquisition of a complex decision making task. This was done by measuring these types of knowledge after training to determine their influence on task performance. It was hypothesized that a true measure of cognitive skill must take into account all components of an individual's mental model so that the causes of performance differences may be more accurately diagnosed. Results are discussed in terms of the diagnostic value of utilizing multiple measures to assess learning and cognitive skill development.