In order to meet new readiness goals, military training is becoming more soldier-centric, just-in-time, and embedded within the situations, equipment, and even uniforms that soldiers use. At the same time, newly emerging technologies, such as mixed and virtual reality, offer opportunities to greatly enhance embedded training. These technologies enable the use of powerful simulations that are designed to achieve specific training goals and performance requirements. By using embedded training with these technologies, we have the opportunity to innovate military training and performance support.

Although new technologies bring much promise, current instructional methodologies do not adequately address how to design and deliver training in context of mixed and virtual reality training scenarios, or how to move seamlessly among different types of training. To address this need, we have developed an instructional methodology, problem-based embedded training (PBET), which enables designers to create simulated mixed and virtual reality missions that are geared to meet specific training objectives. This methodology builds from the problem-based learning (PBL) methodology as well as augmented cognition and scaffolding. To validate the methodology, we conducted a heuristic evaluation with five experts in military training and instructional design. In this paper, we present the methodology, example training materials, and results of this heuristic evaluation. This is part of a project funded by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral & Social Sciences, Simulator Systems Research Unit (Contract Number DASW01-03-C-0014).