COGNITIVE PROCESS OF DECISION MAKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING IN HRD Introduction The growth in science and technology is overwhelming.

These inevitable forces profile challenges and opportunities for people in science and mathematics education. Education today must enable students to meet the challenges ahead and demands of the working environment and of daily living. Thus, students not only need knowledge but also critical thinking skills in the years ahead. Cognition Cognition is the scientific term for mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problem and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy linguistics and computer science. IN psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individuals psychological functions. The term cognition refers to a faculty for the processing of information, applying knowledge and changing preferences. It can be natural or artificial conscious or unconscious. Within psychology the concept of cognition is closely related to abstract concepts such as mind, intelligence, cognition is used to refer to the mental functions mental porecesses (thoughts) and states of intelligent entities.

Piaget's theory of Developmental Psychology tackled cognitive development from infancy to adulthood. Description Intelligence is present; motor activity but no symbols; knowledge is developing yet limited; knowledge is Sensorimotor Infancy based on experiences/ interactions; stage mobility allows child to learn new things; some language skills are developed at the end of this stage Symbols or language skills are present; PreToddler and memory and imagination are operational Early developed; nonreversible and stage Childhood nonlogical thinking; egocentric thinking predominates Logical and systematic form of Concrete Elementary intelligence; manipulation of symbols operational and Early related to concrete objects; operational stage Adolescence thinking predominates nonreversible and egocentric thinking Logical use of symbols related to Formal Adolescence abstract concepts; egocentric thinking operational and Adulthood comes back early in this stage; formal stage thinking is uncommon Meta Cognitive Process The Meta cognitive processes involved in this stage includes overall goal development developing a team mental representation of the problem and planning how the team will solve the problem Decision Making is one of the basic cognitive processes of human behaviours by which a preferred option or a cause of actions is chosen from among a set of alternatives based on certain criteria Stage Age or Period

Decision making is a process that chooses a preferred option or a cause of actions from among a set of alternatives on the basis of given criteria or strategies. Decision theories can be categorized into two parading the descriptive and normative theories. The former is based on empirical observation and on experimental studies of choice behaviours and the latter assumes a rational decision maker who follows welldefined preferences that obey certain axioms of rational behaviours. Decision making is one of the fundamental cognitive processes of human beings that is widely used in determining rational heuristic and intuitive selections in complex scientific engineering, economical and management situations as well as in almost each procedure of daily life since decision making is a basic mental process, it occurs every few seconds in the thinking courses of human mind consciously or subconsciously

Fig 1 A frame work of decisions and strategic

Fig 2
Relationships between decision making process and other process

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Conclusion Decision making is one of the basic cognitive processes of human behaviours by which a preferred option or a course of actions is chosen from among a set of alternative based on certain criteria.