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

该项目旨在提高人类在解决复杂问题的特定领域的表现。拟议的努力声称有助于提高战略问题解决能力的几个重要的理论和操作进展。 该项目以智力发展和案例研究问题解决的文献为基础，在动态，时间依赖和复杂的情况下解决结构不良的问题。该项目更广泛的目标是培养具有战略能力的问题解决者，他们能够在地理空间意识和决策以及应对恐怖主义威胁方面干练地处理复杂的情况。更有限的目标是开发一系列现实而复杂的场景，需要一个本科生团队在一到两周的课程中花费两到四个小时来有意义地解决。这些解决方案将需要Geobase（地理空间信息管理和决策系统）或VNSA（暴力非国家行为者），这是一种模拟工具，用于模拟恐怖主义网络的增长和行为-暴力非国家行为者作为建模场景的工具。 研究设计涉及的措施，参与学员的智力发展在学期开始时，他们解决这些练习，在学期结束时，然后一年后与对照组比较类似的评估。

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.