As instructional designers and trainers, both military and civilian, have begun to understand how to teach behavioral and cognitive cultural skills within specific environments, they continue to struggle with how to generalize these skills across cultures. This study identified a variety of skills that support general cross-cultural perspective taking in military settings, including directed preparation and observation, sense making, prediction, and proactive decision making. But simply identifying these skills is not enough. Prior research has shown that even if the instructional content is well developed, it will only result in effective learning transfer if an appropriate learning methodology is employed. The key to enhancing performance in diverse cultural settings is understanding how to tailor educational principles, learning objectives, and delivery means to the standards required to perform in complex environments.

This study took an in-depth look at instructional method selection for training generalizable cross-cultural skills by exploring learning theory literature and interactive delivery methods, including multimedia and scenario-based approaches, to address the cognitive and cultural challenges faced by today's deployed Soldiers. The study yielded both a model of generalizable, mission-centric cultural skills and suggestions for methods to train those skills for optimal learning transfer.