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AcademiaAbstract
Assessing team dynamics is critical for supporting adaptive team training in live and synthetic environments. In this paper, we review an approach to building a generalizable team dynamics measurement framework to assess dynamic team competencies, including adaptation, resilience, and recovery. The framework is being used to support experiential team training modules within a synthetic training environment supported by the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT). The goal is to assess and improve the ability of team members through structured scenarios with objective team measurement. The work will integrate into the STE (Synthetic Training Environment) Experiential Learning for Readiness Framework to support a more robust strategy to assess and track team development longitudinally (Goldberg et al., 2021).
Our development approach combines hybrid Cognitive Task Analysis (hCTA; Nehme et al., 2006) of the training domain targeting team interaction dependencies, with subject matter expert interviews to align training goals with the introduction of perturbations that interfere with normal team interactions. Perturbations are operationalized as situations that require adaptive team communication and coordination around a designed novel event. Team dynamics metrics are developed with user interaction data captured from the training environment to support the objective assessment of team adaptation and resilience to perturbation. Team competencies assessed using training with perturbation are found to be valid indicators of team success when transferring training to novel contexts (Gorman et al., 2010). We breakdown the process of applying our team measurement framework using Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TC3; Townsend et al., 2016; Madrid et al., 2020; Milham et al., 2017; Ross et al., 2016), while illustrating how the framework can be extended to other use cases. We envision that this approach will inform development of a “plug-and-play” dynamic team assessment framework that a practitioner can use to build team assessments in any dynamic team training environment across military and civilian contexts.