What is cognitive readiness?

Abstract

In this book there are multiple views of cognitive readiness. The purpose of this chapter is to review the various definitions of cognitive readiness. The construct of cognitive readiness will also be briefly compared and contrasted with twenty-first century skills. Cognitive readiness denotes the mental preparation for effective changes in response to altered or unpredictable situations in this fast-changing world. The key constructs in our model are knowledge, skills, and attributes. Knowledge includes domain-specific knowledge for developing cognitive readiness in specific content/process domains as well as prerequisite skills. There are five skills-adaptability, adaptive problem solving, communication, decision making, and situation awareness-and four attributes, i.e., adaptive expertise, creative thinking, metacognition, and teamwork. This chapter will also offer the reader a window into the recent literature regarding these constructs. Several training strategies are proposed to teach cognitive readiness, as well as several strategies to assess cognitive readiness. A feasibility study is presented to show how we investigated the goal of teaching and assessing selected cognitive readiness skills in the context of a Navy simulation. The chapter closes with implications for future research.