Research for Innovative Technology: The Navy Life Game
Abstract
The Navy is continually faced with a need to improve the quality and efficiency of recruitment and retention. However, to accomplish"" this the Navy must manage the expectations and interests of potential new recruits (e.g., Sailors 2025). Specifically, the Naval Pe"rsonnel Command (N1) recognizes that many recruits make decisions to enlist in the Navy and choose specific job ratings without understanding the specific jobs and the duties associated with these jobs. They are often also unaware of the required schooling required or the performance expectations. This partial understanding of Navy life and shipboard operations and responsibilities affects how potential recruits match their interests and abilities to possible ratings. Without a clearer view of job options and the associate"d expectations, the Navy risks creating recruit dissatisfaction which leads in many cases to attrition and additional costs to the N""avy. As the Navy provides more sophisticated technologies on board its ships, they will also require more recruits who are both read"y to learn and adapt to the changing job environments. This proposal conducts research on an approach to improve the match between" recruit knowledge and interests and Navy career paths to avoid attrition in basic training, A-Schools, and C-Schools. In cooperatio""n with ONR and N1, CRESST proposes an effort to conduct research on a family of Navy Life Games, whose objectives are to improve Nav""y recruitment, selection, and classification, and to reduce attrition using a combination embedding JOIN technology with game techno""logy. The overall effort will have two strands. In Strand 1, ONR S&T will reduce the risk of this family of games. In Strand 2, a se""t of nonproprietary games will be designed, developed, and evaluated that can be tailored and used for recruitment, selection, class""ification, and training. This suite of games will be a core game with modules (APS) adjusted to changing Navy needs and capability." This proposal is focused on Strand 1: ONR S&T. There are four interacting research themes: (1) design a systems architecture to sup"port a family of Navy Life games and (2) design and create a Navy Life Game Research preprototype, based on (3) simulated trainee re""search, and improved by (4) research on innovative psychometric computational models. The preprototype will be based on agent-base""d models of simulated trainees~each with specific, numerically-represented person characteristics depicting various cognitive and af""fective constructs (such as interest, motivation, persistence). These simulated trainee models will be developed and refined, and us""ed to generate distributions of game-play performance and behaviors that represent the population of interest (i.e., potential new r"ecruits). This approach to modeling and simulating the interaction of player traits with game-based experiences will dramatically re"duce the need for early human data collection, and promote the discovery of shortcomings early in the design process, well before an"y human testing is required. The preprototype will serve as a game model for a human-playable game aimed at determining the suitability of a person (based on their aptitudes and interests) to the various enlisted ratings and fields that exist in the Navy. To estim"ate the strength of the relations among constructs and select those to be incorporated in our models, we will draw on two sources of"" evidence: (a) extant literature [e.g., meta-analyses that summarize bodies of empirical evidence (Hattie, 2008)]; and (b) existing"" data sets from PISA, CRESST~s efficacy studies, and if available from N1 (e.g., JOIN) and TAPAS.CRESST also proposes the developm""ent of innovative, cutting-edge psychometric and statistical models. These will be accomplished using simulated trainees and our wor"k on feature analyses and telemetry. We propose to adapt general purpose latent variable models. The period of performance will be J"une 1, 2
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 07, 2017
- Source ID
- N000141712652
Entities
People
- Eva Baker
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of California, Los Angeles