Teams now are a common sight in many government organizations, companies and industries.
Although most managers agree teams are valuable, questions remain as to how to create the best teams and how to train them. Cooke's goal is to create measures of team knowledge. Understanding how teams learn and share knowledge can be critical in situations involving emergency medical teams, military teams or teams running nuclear power plants, she said. Most current cognitive research, the study of thinking and learning, focuses on individuals, Cooke said. There has been very little research on team cognition measurement.