Exploratory and Education Proposal: Measuring and Improving Complex Reasoning Skill in National Security Domains

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This project aims to elevate human performance in the specific area of complex problem solving. The proposed effort claims to contribute to several important theoretical and operational advances in increasing strategic problem solving abilities. The project is grounded in literatures of intellectual development and case study problem solving in contexts with ill-structured problems in dynamic, time dependent, and complex situations. The broader goals of the project are to produce strategically capable problem solvers who can ably tackle complex scenarios in the context of geospatial awareness and decision-making and response to terrorist threats. The more limited goals are to develop a series of realistic and complex scenarios that require a team of undergraduates up to two to four hours to meaningfully solve over one to two weeks of classes. The solutions will require either Geobase (a geospatial information management and decision-making system) or VNSA, Violent Non-State Actor, which is a simulation tool that models growth and behavior of terrorist networks-violent non-state actors as tools for modeling scenarios. The research design involves measures of intellectual development of the participating cadets at the beginning of the term in which they solve these exercises, at the end of the term, and then one year later with a control group comparison similarly assessed.