Evaluating an Adaptive Trainer for a Complex Decision-Making Task

摘要

Adaptive training (AT) is training that adjusts relative to a learner's performance, aptitude, or learning preference (Landsberg, Van Buskirk, Astwood, Mercado, & Aakre, 2011). Several literature reviews have found that AT generally leads to positive learning outcomes (e.g., Durlach & Ray, 2011; Landsberg et al., 2011; McCarthy, 2008), but the AT literature lacks systematic empirical evidence to determine which AT techniques work best for which tasks and learners (Durlach & Ray, 2011; Vandewaetere, Desmet, & Clarebout, 2011). Therefore, the goal of the present experiment was to determine if similar AT techniques that were effective in one type of task would also be effective for a different task. Specifically, we used AT techniques (i.e., adapting feedback and scenario difficulty based on learner's performance during training) that were shown to be effective for training periscope operators on a visuo-spatial task (Landsberg, Mercado, Van Buskirk, Lineberry, & Steinhauser, 2012) and applied them to a complex decision-making task to determine whether the effectiveness of these AT techniques are task-dependent.