Identifying Significant Cognitive Factors for Practicing and Learning Meteorology

Understanding which cognitive factors facilitate meteorology skills is important for meteorology training and education. This study investigated aspects of cognition important to successful completion of meteorology tasks typically provided to student meteorologists. With a sample of 81 participants-spanning the range of experience from undergraduate students to professional meteorologists-we administered two spatial thinking tests, a visuospatial working memory test, a concept inventory, and an experience questionnaire. We compared the resulting scores to performance on a series of novice-level meteorology tasks. An analysis of the data suggests that meteorology knowledge along with disembedding skill (the ability to observe and recognize patterns among nonessential information) positively predicts performance on the meteorological tasks. The relationship among meteorology knowledge, disembedding skill, and performance on the meteorology tasks indicates that disembedding is an important predictor of success at both low and high levels of meteorology knowledge. Thus, our results suggest that individuals with heightened ability to identify patterns embedded in distracting background displays may be at an advantage for completing meteorology tasks of the type that we provided.