There is an ongoing need in the Army to enhance soldiers' and leaders' battlefield thinking skills, especially as Future Combat Systems technologies are introduced. To improve cognitive task performance, soldiers and leaders must engage in deliberate practice in context-rich environments, including training scenarios and simulations, field exercises, and actual combat situations. An important aspect of training tactical thinking skills that still needs development, however, is assessment. How do we know that cognitive skills are improving across experiences and over time? Diagnostic assessment will allow us to evaluate training effectiveness and tailor training as expertise develops.

The goal of this project was to develop a technique to assess tactical thinking skills. In previous projects, we created a Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale for tactical thinking (T-BARS) based on eight themes. The initial T-BARS attempted to capture the progression of tactical skill development, but was developed for limited internal use. The goal of this project was to develop the T-BARS by expanding and validating it to make it more robust and broadly useful. We collected feedback from combat arms Captains, Majors, and Lieutenant Colonels to vignettes provided by the U.S. Army Research Institute. The vignettes were developed as part of their Think Like a Commander training program. We used these responses to improve the T-BARS by adding behavioral anchors, clarifying and proportioning the scale for each of the eight themes, and iteratively testing the T-BARS to reach a goal of 80% inter-rater agreement. The final product was a tool designed to accurately rate the development and quality of tactical thinking. T-BARS in its validated form can be used both as a diagnostic assessment and as a methodology for training effectiveness evaluations.