Knowledge Bank

In a world where teamwork is the norm, it is useful to understand how individuals work together in order to assemble an effective team. The study of macrocognition has identified a set of definitions that describe how individuals work together to solve a problem. In prior research, a number of proposed macrocognitive processes have been empirically identified, primarily via coding of verbal transcripts, in a number of laboratory and field settings. However, this set of macrocognitive process definitions has not been validated outside of the initial empirical research. The purpose of this study was to validate that the proposed macrocognitive process distinctions exist. Study participants were presented with a deck of cards with the macrocognitive process definitions and examples of these definitions. They were then asked to sort the process definitions based on a single criterion. This activity was repeated until the participant could no longer make unique distinctions or time ran out. Similar distinctions across study participants were then grouped into categories for validation. The findings suggest that distinctions represented in many conceptual frameworks for collaborative activities are widely believed to exist, even among study participants with little to no prior knowledge of the literature on macrocognition. Future work would include a systematic exploration of how the identified distinctions map onto other conceptual frameworks for macrocognition.