Twelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 55 Analytic processes 1. Diagnosis 2, Planning 3. Causation 4. Judgment Social processes 1. Influence 2. Teamwork 3. Negotiation 4, Describing What kind of stuff is this? I said above that these are cognitive pro- cesses. So let’s look at them from that perspective. Let’s start with the analytic processes. What does it mean to say that diagnosis is a cognitive process? It means that there are steps and these steps are based in thought rather than in action. The first step may be to gather evidence, for example. While this seems like a physical act, and often it is, it is actually a mental act. Evidence can be gathered by asking questions, by looking carefully at a scene, by listening to sounds, or by taking blood tests. There are many ways to gather evidence and typically the physical manifestations of evidence gathering bear no real relationship to one another. Evidence gathering is a mental act, although physical actions may be involved. It is a mental act that is part of a set of complex men- tal processes that, of course, include reasoning about the evidence, checking the validity of the evidence, comparing known information with previous cases that are similar, and so on. Diagnosis is a complex mental process. Teaching diagnosis matters because getting good at diagnosis can make you a good mother, a good teacher, a good detec- tive, a good nearly anything you can think of. The process of diagnosis is constant in our mental lives. Are all 12 of the processes listed above like this? Clearly the oth- er analytic processes are very similar. Planning is a mental activity that one gets better at by doing it. Whether you are planning a party or planning a career, the process involves thinking about steps and HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023801