Acquisition of compound skills and learning costs for expanding competence sets

For each decision problem, there is a competence set consisting of ideas, knowledge, information, and skills for solving that problem. When decision makers have not acquired the competence set, it is more difficult for them to make decisions. In order to effectively acquire a needed competence set to cope with the problem they face, finding an appropriate learning sequence for acquiring needed single skills for decision makers, the so-called competence set expansion, is very necessary. A compound skill represents a collection of single skills that might be acquired, and some useful compound skills can be added to the needed competence set to help acquire some single skills. To effectively expand the competence set, effective acquisitions of compound skills and learning costs are both necessary. This paper thus proposes a data mining technique to extract potentially useful compound skills from single skills. Subsequently, an effective method is proposed to obtain the learning cost between any two skills. A computer simulation is employed to further show that it is feasible to use those potentially useful compound skills to facilitate the acquisition of single skills through a known integer programming method for expanding the competence set. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.