Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 49 a child who speaks poorly. The value held by the parents may well be that self-confidence is more important than being articulate (“We don’t want to criticize him.”). Perhaps it is. But the consequences of one’s values manifest themselves every time a value-based decision is made, Nevertheless, we do need to learn to make value-based judgments. Doing this requires understanding what our values are. Confronting a person with her own value system (one that she has unconsciously adopted) can help her think things out, but change is never easy. ANALYTIC PROCESSES 1. Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations Diagnosis is a very important skill and one that needs to be learned both in principle and separately for each domain of knowledge. Diag- nosis of heart disease isn’t a different process in principle from diag- nosis of a faulty spark plug in a car engine. Nevertheless, one wants a specialist to do the diagnosis in each case. Why is this? Diagnosis is a matter of both reasoning from evidence and understanding what to look for to gather evidence. Given all the evidence, it is easy to make a diagnosis in an area of knowledge you don’t know very well. So, the gathering of the evidence is the most important part. Crime analysts and gardeners both do diagnosis. They both reason from evidence. What separates them is knowing what constitutes important evidence and what does not. Here again, this comes from experienced cases. Analytic processes involve attention to details that enable the forming of hypotheses that can be tested by a variety of methods. These three pieces, determining evidence, forming hypotheses, and testing hypotheses, are what is commonly referred to as the scientific method. When science is taught, it often dwells on the facts of science rather than the process. Diagnosis is about the process. But the process is not of much