The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) faces a future of increasingly complicated and volatile environments, in which Marines must be prepared to make difficult decisions in high stress and high stakes situations. As a result, the USMC Vision and Strategy 2025 highlights the need for training that focuses on the individual and leverages the latest advances in technology to prepare Marines for complex operational environments. Adaptive training (AT), which is training that is tailored to an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, is well-suited to meet this need and has led to more efficient and effective learning gains than traditional non-adaptive approaches in certain domains. However, little research has examined the effectiveness of AT in complex military decision-making tasks. To these ends, this paper will discuss the development of a testbed called Adaptive Training for Terminal Air Controllers (ATTAC) and the results of a training effectiveness evaluation.

ATTAC tackles game plan development, which is a critical decision-making task performed by the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) that sets the stage for executing close air support (CAS) missions. Developing a game plan includes selecting and employing the best ordnance to meet mission requirements and is a challenging topic for many JTAC trainees to master.  Informed by science of learning principles, ATTAC works by presenting a trainee with a series of CAS scenarios, and based on the trainee’s responses, the system provides tailored feedback and adjusts the difficulty of subsequent scenarios.  In this way, the trainee receives a unique training experience optimized to his/her ability level.

We are conducting a training effectiveness evaluation of ATTAC and have collected data from 34 USMC personnel to date. The final paper will include results from the completed experiment, but initial results suggest that AT leads to more positive learning outcomes compared to non-adaptive and traditional training methods.