Acquisition and Retention of Soldiering Skills: Report of Year 2 Progress
Abstract
This report describes a project designed to develop and validate a convenient, practical method that individual unit commanders and training managers can use when deciding how to allocate training resources in order to maximize combat readiness. Previous project accomplishments are briefly reviewed, and activities associated with the second year of effort are described in detail. These Year 2 activities include: 1) A field experiment of acquisition and retention performance of Infantry tasks, using soldiers in MOS 11B. One hundred sixty-five (165) soldiers were trained on 27 tasks and tested for recall at two-month intervals. Also, the effects of overtraining, previous testing, and soldier abilities (i.e., AFQT and ASVAB composite scores) were examined. 2) The development of a User's Decision Aid, which used ratings of task characteristics to estimate retention functions for each task. 3) The assessment of the relationship between the predicted and empirically obtained retention functions. Results indicated that it was possible to estimate soldiers' proficiency accurately over time, using the User's Decision Aid ratings. Also, the field experiment demonstrated that, for many tasks, retention could be improved by overtraining. Soldier abilities were not systematically related to performance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1984
- Accession Number
- ADA142436
Entities
People
- A. M. Rose
- C. Manning
- P. Ford
- P. Radtke
Organizations
- American Institutes for Research