Abstract
High-stress professions, including those in the military, medical, and emergency response fields demand the inherent ability to perform effectively under pressure. For military personnel, managing stress effectively is crucial for mission success. While adaptive learning and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) hold immense potential for providing personalized training, a theoretically grounded framework for developing and evaluating their effectiveness in building stress resilience is lacking. This highlights a critical research need: how can we effectively leverage adaptive training systems to improve performance under stress. This paper presents a novel coaching and feedback framework that can be used to develop evidence-based strategies that can be integrated into ITSs to enhance stress resilience and facilitate the development of essential technologies and coaching strategies.
Drawing upon existing literature on stress resilience and ITSs, the framework outlines different types of adaptive training strategies and key components needed to provide stress-aligned coaching including, 1) a learner model that retains information about individual differences in baseline physiology profiles, stress classifiers, and historical performance on stress management, 2) a domain model that embeds stress injects and context-aligned assessments for a given task or scenario, and 3) a pedagogical model that leverages the learner and domain models to select individualized coaching strategies designed to optimize performance and stress management. The framework outlines data requirements for an ITS to model and coach stress responses by establishing criteria to assess performance, populate learner models, structure instructional feedback and dynamically adjust training scenarios. A framework of this nature will be used to drive empirical studies across different coaching strategies and to train machine learning classifiers to personalize the selection of strategies based on variations across both learner and domain models. Ultimately, this work will guide future research and inform the development of improved stress modeling and coaching strategies to better prepare personnel in high-stakes domains.